Scott Hamilton: "After
Hours" (Concord)
Dial-a-track code: 1641
In recent years the very consistent Hamilton has had a rich harvest of recording form. Partly, it's a refining of his art with age, but it's also the vintage company he has kept - none better than the matured in the cask piano of the great Tommy Flanagan on this magisterial session from last December. There are no impediments to this marriage of true minds; urged on by Bob Cranshaw (bass) and Lewis Nash (drums) - Nash's may be the moans of appreciation occasionally audible - Hamilton and Flanagan offer each other mutual inspiration as the quartet hits, at times, a euphoric groove. The material is mostly unjustly neglected standards - Some Other Spring and How Am I To Know, for example - with good jazz originals, all treated with an authoritative lyricism that is compelling.
Nat Pierce: "The Ballad Of Jazz Street" (HEP)
Dial a track code: 1751
A little known gem of mainstream big band jazz, now on CD for the first time. The late Nat Pierce, noted as a Basic style pianist and for his association with Woody Herman's orchestra, wrote and arranged all but one of these eight pieces recorded privately to professional standard in 1960. With a band which included Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves, Paul Quinichette, Eddie Bert and Jimmy Cleveland, he fashioned a series of performances which showed him as much indebted to Ellington as to the Basic and Herman influences also present in abundance here normally attributed to him. Even at its most dense, the writing retains the linear clarity of someone like Bill Holman, while the soloing of Terry, Gonsalves, Pierce and trumpeter Burt Collins in particular, is outstanding.
Michael Garrick: "For love of Duke and Ronnie"
(JAZA)
Dial a track code: 1961
Pianist, composer and arranger Garrick can dip into an instrumental palette as richly - textured and satisfying as anyone in the world of jazz. It's distinguished by a gently lyric intelligence - and the jazz equivalent of multi lingualism; he speaks a number of jazz dialects fluently, but what he has to say is his alone. It's expressed beautifully here in a dozen big band performances, rounded out by a moving quartet vale diction to the late Ronnie Scott: in their range of orchestral colour and beguilingly melodic fecundity, these performances are persuasive evidence of his talents, exemplified above all by the superbly created and developed mood of Kyrie.
