Michael Garrick: Down On Your Knees (JAZA)
Pianist Michael Garrick's compositional strengths include an ability to sound contemporary, yet firmly rooted - the echoes in his work are of Ellington and Gil Evans, fused with a feeling for Coltrane and post-Coltrane jazz, perhaps. A distinctive, original artistic personality, he also mixes the poetic and the humorous in his writing, somehow reconciling all these facets in a persuasive structure like the first-rank teller of musical tales he is. Here those gifts are exuberantly responded to by the superb orchestra of his two previous JAZA big band albums. With a singer, Anita Wardell, added on four tracks, it's a more unbuttoned display of the band's powers and, most of all, further testimony of Garrick's sheer genius for orchestral colour and coaxing the best from his talented soloists.
Ray Comiskey
Lester Young: In Washington, DC 1956 (Pablo)
Young's veiled final decade was mostly a period of decline, but the tenor saxophonist sometimes stirred sufficiently to remind one of his greatness. This fifth in a series of live amateur recordings from a 1956 club date catches a sensitive, gentle man in splendid form; from the equivocal mixture of vulnerability and strength conveyed by time, tone and the sheer relaxation of his long lines, it's clear that this master of deceptive simplicity for once felt secure. Sympathetically backed by a trio led by pianist/arranger Bill Potts (who later did a marvellous big band Porgy and Bess) he makes his affectingly oblique melodic way through a familiar reportoire, joined on four tracks (released years ago, despite the sleeve's claims to the contrary) by the accomplished trombone of Earl Swope.
Ray Comiskey