All but two of the charts on Doo’s Blues, the Dusko Goykovich album I review below, are by the Serbian trumpeter himself, including the most unlikely jazz title ever, The Wedding March Of Alexander The Macedonian. It’s worth noting Goykovich’s contribution – he died last year – to the still hazily differentiated category of European jazz.
The record came to me as a LP. Recent reports claimed that LP and CD sales were up in Britain and streaming ones down. I’ve been talking to a vinyl retailer, who told me: “Reports vary. A lot of these things depend on what’s being counted. Our takings have been up year on year for the last four years; this year they’re 11% down. We always have a year now and again that doesn’t have very strong releases.
“Vinyl is becoming more expensive and kids are actually starting to buy CDs again, especially secondhand ones for a couple of quid. Vinyl seems to be a media obsession, some sort of weird feel-good story for ageing or hipster journos. We’ve been in the business since 1988. Formats and shops come and go. We’re still here but there’s more competition.”
Dusko Goykovich: Doo’s Blues (Sdban LP19)
Goykovich had long been competing on equal terms with Americans when the previously unissued sides on this album were recorded. He’s in cool/bop mode on five of his own compositions (the other two are by tenor saxophonist and flautist Bent Jaedig) with a European quintet and – on the final track – with a rather cumbersome big band, the BRT Jazzorkest, Belgian Radio’s house band, in recordings from 1967 for Belgian radio.
With innate talent and confidence gained from working with the Clarke/Boland band and those of Woody Herman and Maynard Ferguson, he flies through the six quintet numbers, evidently inspiring Jaedig and others, though star vibraphonist Fats Sadi needed little encouragement. Goykovich’s so-called “Balkan Jazz” was enshrined in the album Swinging Macedonia but is here lightly represented on that wedding march and the band track, The Nights Of Skopje. Alexander’s nuptials must have been worth the guest invitations.
The following reviews are on CD.
Olivier Robin Quintet: Take It Like It Is (Swing Alley SA 048)
It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy to discover that jazz drummer-composers are exerting a big influence on the charts they’ve written. Frenchman Olivier Robin, also a classically trained percussionist, weaves such a compelling tapestry behind the easygoing numbers on his quintet’s new album that it more or less dictates the tone and the colour of the music, not to mention its rhythm and tempo.
This might read as though the influence were overbearing but it’s not. Trumpeter Josiah Woodson, saxophonist Alex Terrier, and pianist Albert Bover seem to gain much from Robin’s foundational skills, the first two duetting tantalisingly on Fragment as a feature that keeps the textures light and transparent. The quiet dexterity of Woodson on Back To The 60s and Terrier’s flying sax on Express Lane, the latter being the fourth track and the occasion for Robin’s first drum solo – one that maintains the velocity he’s established – are typical. Bassist Fabricio Nicolas is up there with the leaders.
Matt Panayides Trio: With Eyes Closed (Pacific Coast Jazz PJ93456)
Cincinatti-born guitarist Panayides throws three GAS standards into the mix for his fourth album with Pacific Coast, inviting comparisons between them and charts of equivalent genre written by jazz musicians.
Unless there’s a Frank Foster anniversary to be marked, it’s probably a coincidence that Simone, the saxophonist’s jazz waltz, is up for my consideration in more or less successive review batches: the previous one was by Nigel Price and Alban Claret (ditto: Woody Shaw’s The Moontrane, by the same guitar duo). But many standards by the musicians themselves are languishing for want of interest.
Panayides’ three songbook inclusions are Jules Stein’s I Fall In Love Too Easily, Henry Mancini”s Moon River, and Jimmy Van Heusen’s Darn That Dream; though as if to guide these tunes from another place into a vibrant jazz avenue, he creates for the Stein an original harmonic template, performs the Mancini unaccompanied as an introspective exercise, and sets up the Van Heusen as a duo for himself and the arco bass of Steve LaSpina.
But it’s more than that. The Payanides trio maintains high standards of interplay with subtle embellishments.
Mark Masters Ensemble: Sui Generis (Capri Records 74172-2)
“West Coast cool”, in the sense of an orchestral lightness bordering on the weighty, might reasonably describe composer-arranger Mark Masters’ new album. The Masters Ensemble – here an octet featuring former Stan Kenton trumpeter Tim Hagans – performs nine originals in what the publicity calls “a concerto for chamber orchestra”. Sui Generis is not so much a concerto as a jazz suite with Hagans first among equals.
Were it a tad more nippy, the seventh track, Pebbles, would be classic West Coast, the septet behind Hagans of two saxes, trombone, French horn, piano, bass and drums providing the heft and locomotion that Californians have always kept on the go. Hagans, freewheeling above the band, reaches high and Jerry Pinter’s saxophone solo is generous to a fault in its devising and duration.
Meet Me At Sal & Angie’s, like other arrangements, is ensemble driven and includes solos by piano (Jeff Colella) and bass (Chris Colangelo) before Hagans arrives from altitude to enliven proceedings even more.
John-Paul Muir: Home Now (Ubuntu UBU 1078)
None of the above albums has the restraint New Zealand pianist Muir brings to his suite of tunes, the first three being song settings of texts by Anjali Bhat and delivered captivatingly by Brigitte Beraha, the rest wordless charts but extending the songs’ sentiments. Muir often extracts a flavour of Ravelian post-impressionism from the piano and sets a measured pace for the compositions. In the songs, this allows voice and instruments, primarily George Crowley’s bass clarinet, to wind themselves around the verses, which are repeated in Silent Acknowledgement and in Home Now, split into three stanzas then a final two with intervening exegesis from Muir and Crowley.
The music’s even temperament relies for variety on crescendi, especially in the voiceless instrumentals Balm and Overjoyed, on which Crowley switches to tenor sax. When minor tumult occurs in the songs, Beraha meets it with sturdy vocalese. Bassist Jakub Cywiński and drummer Eric Ford are in close attendance, the former breaking out with a couple of assertive solos. It’s an album that knows what it wants to do and does it well.
It’s been a half-decent year for jazz if the number of albums being offered for review in this magazine is any guide, one in which the newly minted for a change appeared to equal or exceed the ever-perennial. This ageing hipster was happy enough with that. Happy new year, everyone!
2024 favourites
Annie Chen: Guardians (JZ Music JZC 24001) (new). Little surprise to me that the Beijing-born, New York-based singer Annie Chen’s new album is up for awards. Chen borrows freely from Chinese and other cultures to illustrate the environmental concept of animal life at bay. And why not? In a world finally consumed by climate change, there’ll be no jazz and no-one to listen to it. There are two Chen takes on works by 20th-century composers and a wealth of other musical allusions. Guardians is also the kind of album that listeners knocked aside by the rapidity of developments in jazz can employ to get their bearings – or not.
Victor Lewis: Know It Today, Know It Tomorrow (Crepuscule/Red Records RR12355-2) (archive). This 1992 session was notable for the presence of significant newcomers: tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake and bassist Christian McBride; also, for the presence of Lewis himself as a composer: he supplied all nine tracks – and what gems they were. Blake, particularly, was an eloquent newcomer to a jazz corpus in which to be original is always difficult. Blake plays as though unfazed by the example of his forebears while obviously not trying to avoid them, and McBride brings muscle to motion.