Paul van Kessel: The Lonesome Road (self-released)
Paul van Kessel’s voice is like a roasted chestnut on an open fire, laced with a trace of smooth soul. He works its fragility to its advantage in the intimate setting of The Lonesome Road, a duet with pianist Sebastiaan van Bavel that’s spruced up with sparse guitar patterns and overdubbed voice. The pace is slow and the Dutchman’s relaxed delivery of evergreens such as Throw It Away and In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning has a gently calming effect without sacrificing the album’s charming mix of lucidity and subdued emotion.
Almost Blue is notable for Van Kessel’s nuanced flexibility and underlined by the excellent Van Bavel, who delicately lures it into the realm of Chopin. Van Kessel’s tunes are strong. The folksy title track has the alluring simplicity of a Jeff Tweedy song that makes you hum it for days on end. No small feat.
Oscar Moore: The Enchanting Guitar Of Oscar Moore (Fresh Sound Records 1159)
Enchanting is a fitting description for Oscar Moore, whose elegant voicing and subtle embellishments were the finishing touch to Nat King Cole’s suave songs. Cole’s crooning and piano playing were to Moore what a lion cup is to the zookeeper, a cup that is cared for with delicacy, precision and empathy. Nothwithstanding, there was more to Moore’s playing than enchantment, not least a healthy dose of R&B.
Although historically relevant, CD1 – an overview of singles on small labels as Exclusive, Atlas and Kem – is the least interesting of the bunch, showcasing the jazz-guitar pioneer in various configurations up to 1954, mostly accompanying singers such as Charles Brown and Kitty White with the band of his brother Oscar, which he’d joined after leaving the Cole outfit in 1945. Evidently, Moore had lost nothing of his sophisticated but earthy style, but forgettable material prevented him from surpassing himself, let alone scoring a hit.
Strangely, not even good songs gave a boost to the career of Moore, who would never match his period with Cole and intermittently resorted to working as a bricklayer in Los Angeles.
Great repertoire (and great musicians) make up the bulk of CD2 and CD3, a mix of reissued work and unearthed material. Moore’s collectible Oscar Moore Quartet from 1954 (plus outtakes) is an excellent set of evergreens with pure jazzmen – pianist Carl Perkins, bassist Joe Comfort and drummer Lee Young. His singing tone intact, Moore is fiery and inventive on melodies such as Love For Sale and There’ll Never Be Another You and slowly burning (and wildly flamenco-ish) on Brother Can You Spare A Dime.
Moore’s duet with bassist Leroy Vinegar from 1956, originally released as a reel-to-reel tape by Standard Radio Transcriptions, is a rewarding session of rhythm guitar, bass and overdubbed solo guitar and a fine example of clarity and effortless flow – a great archival find and, moreover, a surprisingly modern stereo endeavour. It sounds better than Moore’s 1965 tribute LP to Cole, We’ll Remember You, Nat, which nevertheless is a proper ending of this typically high-quality, lavishly annotated and illustrated Fresh Sound box set.
Jim Snidero: Bird Feathers (Savant 2224)
If there’s one scene that keeps the legacy of Charlie Parker alive, it’s the New York school of vital veterans. Alto saxophonist Jim Snidero takes up the bat on Bird Feathers, limelighting Bird’s genius with bassist Peter Washington and drummer Joe Farnsworth, both reputed and relentless figureheads of classic jazz. There’s nifty melodic interaction on classics such as Ornithology and undervalued gems such as Charlie’s Wig. But it is during his renditions of These Foolish Things and Lover Man (a capella, another challenging format) that Snidero makes his session truly come to life, bittersweetly singing the blues. It seems that here he’s finally forgetting his responsibility of filling the harmonic void of his piano-less format, which isn’t perfectly compatible, to my ears, with the relatively high range of his horn.
Fruit shakes
Approximately five years ago, I was hipped to a gig of Californian saxophonist Doug Webb by Dutch drum maestro Eric Ineke. It was at café Pavlov in The Hague. The day before, Webb, Ineke and bassist Marius Beets recorded an album – Doug Webb In Holland – in Zeist in the Eastern part of The Netherlands. During the intermission, Webb and I struck up a conversation. Beets sat beside us at the bar, yawned and took a sip of his second espresso. Webb told me that he had travelled a bit further into the province of Drenthe yesterday and had visited a fruit shop run by a guy who was the specialist in fruit shakes. A fruit maker.
This struck me as rather quirky. Who in his right mind would go all the way to the sticks merely to obtain a crate of healthy juices? I attributed this to the fact that Webb carried a pony tail and hails from the West Coast, the motherland of mindfulness and the health cult. “Quite something,” I said, “to travel all the way to Drenthe for some fruit shakes.” Webb nodded approvingly though I noticed a slightly puzzled look in his eyes. “By the way,” I continued, “the village that you’re talking about, Grollo, is the birthplace of the greatest Dutch blues band ever, Cuby & The Blizzards, which also at one time included the famous junkie painter Herman Brood.”
“I doubt if he knows who either Cuby or Brood is,” Beets said sullenly.
The trio resumed playing and included, I vividly remember, a sublime version of Chelsea Bridge. It was only a little while later at home that I learned on the internet that there is a renowned flute maker in the little village of Grollo. So, Webb was enthusiastically talking all the time about flutes and the flute maker all the time. Oh my God, I thought, what must this guy have been thinking? Fruit shakes. I’ve never seen Doug since. I attribute this to the fact that the reed and woodwind player concluded that all jazz journalists in Holland are positively loony. Veritable fruit cakes.
