Frequent Downbeat award-winner Steve Turre has performed with Roland Kirk, Ray Charles, Art Blakey, Chico Hamilton, Slide Hamilton, Hugh Masekela and Tito Puente among many others. This eclectic background is reflected in the many moods of this intriguing CD.
The tight ensemble work on the opening Planting The Ceed could easily come from the Messengers play book, with the leader, James Carter and Wallace Roney Jnr all reflecting that hard-swinging idiom in their choruses. Dinner With Duke is an evocative love-letter to Ellington allowing Turre to display his mastery of the plunger in a delicate duet with Roney in a harmon.
Blue Smoke is a real down-home blues with some funky guitar from Ed Cherry who has worked with Dr. Lonnie Smith and Hamiet Bluiett. Don D with its dancing bass line is a laid-back reggae chart dedicated to Don Drummond, the trombonist-leader of the celebrated Jamaican group The Skatalites. Flower Power, based on an ostinato, has some inventive three-part interplay (trombone, trumpet and soprano) leading to an ethereal conch-shell statement from the leader.
Turre has composed a selection of superior material here but he has included one songbook standard – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. It gets a melodic 6/8 work-out with a Latin twist which works really well.
Discography
Planting The Ceed; Dinner With Duke; Blue Smoke; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes; Don D; Pharoah’s Dance; Flower Power; Good People; Sweet Dreams; Resistance (70.17)
Turre (tb, conch shell) with, collectively: Wallace Roney Jnr. (t); Emilio Modeste (ts, ss); James Carter (ts); Isaiah Thompson (p); Trevor Watkis (elp); Ed Cherry, Andy Bassford (elg); Corcoran Holt, Buster Williams (b); Derek Barnett (elb); Orion Turre, Lenny White, Karl Wright (d); Pedrito Martinez (pc). NYC, 29 March 2022.
Smoke Sessions Records SSR-2204
