Tim Garland & Geoffrey Keezer: Mezzo
UK saxophonist Tim Garland and American pianist Geoffrey Keezer perform together on this admirable duo album as though celebrating its many attractions, not least Garland’s use on seven of the nine tracks of the rare mezzo-soprano saxophone, reputedly one of just a score in existence. Worth some research.
Then there’s the prestige of Keezer’s fiery baptism with the Art Blakey Jazz Messengers and Garland’s association with Chick Corea, not to mention – but I shall – the pre-launch praise bestowed on the album by Gary Burton, Joe Lovano and Billy Childs. As musicians in harness, both Garland and Keezer distinguished themselves in the Storms/Nocturnes chamber trio with vibraphonist Joe Locke.
They both kick up a storm and observe the moody silences of the night on this album, too, having unbridled fun from the start on Corea’s La Fiesta and on the Gnossienne No 1 by Satie, dealing in the latter with the need to resist too much ornamentation but subtly harmonising its unravelling line. The mezzo sax’s tonal properties might be described as hybrid, but Garland gets more out of the instrument than its alto-soprano duality suggests. Out of the blocks it can recall, for a few seconds, some home-made horn of Roland Kirk but without Kirk’s manic edginess.
Garland supplies four of the nine charts. One’s by Keezer – Ghost In The Photograph – on which Garland opts for the familiar B-flat soprano (he also does on Mulgrew Miller’s Carousel), and the others by divers hands.
Keezer’s is not just a florid accompaniment, the pedestrian way in which a duo pianist often confronts the responsibility of having the heavier sonic armoury; instead he and Garland approach each chart line abreast and embark on uninhibited exegesis of its development, equal in partnership, inspiring in support and joyous in discovery.
Discography
La Fiesta; Gnossienne No.1; To The One Who Flies; A Prayer At Winter; Carousel; Out Of Towner; Every Time We Say Goodbye; Ghost In The Photograph; The Waves Between (47.53)
Garland (mezzo s, ss); Keezer (p). New York, 28 May 2025.
Tim Garland Music TGM 1111CD
Rachel Sutton: Realms
While it’s no exaggeration to call Rachel Sutton a persuasive advocate for her own songs, it’s no less off beam to urge that others would find them amenable too. All 10 on her super new album are hers bar Billy Barnes’s Something Cool, and Daytrip, which she co-wrote with husband Roland Perrin, the accomplished pianist on an album lifted by musical surprises.
The opening of the gateway track, Summer Song, is chord-plotted by Perrin behind Sutton’s lyric before it segues into a light Latin treatment that sets the tone for what’s to come. Those departures arrive immediately on There’s A Feeling, which is given gospel-like leverage by a quintet choir. Love’s light shines through the album, not least in the final Farley’s Song, dedicated as a wish for a life of peace, happiness – and music (what else?) for Sutton’s and Perrin’s young daughter. Castles In The Sky is a wistful tear of nostalgia in a changed world, with a Sutton-Perrin intro and coda.
Sutton easily dispenses oomph on The Jester And The Jewel, with its dramatic crescendo and its sentiment underscored by another jolt, this time the plangent and uninterrupted solo of guitarist Sandy Buglass. More variety lifts the uptempo Latin vibe of Time, which employs a three-man horn section (trumpet soloist Ryan Quigley) and guitar, this time played by Ebenezer Oke. The hazy, lazy Daytrip was chosen to trail the album, though it’s easily overtaken by other performances, not least on the Barnes chart, whose sultry Sutton vocal meditates on an urban liaison. It’s as immaculately wrought an example as any other of how Sutton takes theatrical possession of her material.
Discography
Summer Song; There’s A Feeling; The Jester And The Jewel; Castles In The Sky; Time; Daytrip; Something Cool; All You Can Eat; I’d Really Love It; Farley’s Song (43.31)
Sutton (v, arr); Roland Perrin (p); Michael Curtis Ruiz (b); Paul Robinson (d, pc); Adebisi Grace Ajiboye (v); Paul Booth (s); and others. London, April 2024.
33 Records 33Jazz318
Diana Torti: Fearless
Female jazz singing continues to deliver bounty in music of absorbing self-sufficiency. Diana Torti’s album of songs composed by guitarist Sabino de Bari, to which she’s supplied challenging lyrics, indicates that little suggests similarities among the distaff practitioners but much emphasises their originality. The success of Fearless has a great deal to do with the music’s unusual timbre – the source of chords is de Bari’s classical and fretless guitars – and the way Andrea Colella’s bass and Francesco De Rubeis’s kit cosy up to the singer’s free-floating vocal lines. It also scores highly in the generous time accorded to both guitar and voice in extracting the most from elusive vignettes; they’re not charts with conventional solo assignments but offerings in which melody and lyric are shaped by a twin guitar-voice approach.
Like the elusiveness of the words, Torti’s clear, diaphanous sound and her command of intonation on long-breathed phrases and interval leaps is deceptively understated. Only on one chart, not hers but de Bari’s – Whisky, for which he wrote music and words – does the sentiment require a more “lived-in” voice to authenticate the feeling of being “a motherless child” and “wanting hard liquor all day”. As a variant on the blues trope, the chart sits out of kilter on an album of songs in which relationships are sharply defined by sophisticated reference to the natural world and locale; Montmartre Café, an example of the latter, strongly recalls cityscape painter Maurice Utrillo. But otherwise an album of lively charm.
Discography
The Hawk’s Hills; Secret Places; Whisky; Montmartre Café; Ups And Downs; Fearless; Afro Blue (44.18)
Torti (v); Sabino de Bari (g); Andrea Colella (b); Francesco De Rubeis (d, pc). Rome, October 2024.
Tambora Music
