Mark Turner: Ballad Session, (Warner Bros)
An all-ballad album is a surprising, seemingly conservative twist from Turner, a brilliant young tenor whose influences include Coltrane and Warne Marsh. But it's carried through with considerable imagination, intelligence, lyricism and, at both group and solo level, a measure of originality behind a deceptively simple facade. It's also starkly beautiful. The material is well-chosen; a few standards, like Skylark and All Or Nothing At All, leaven intriguing pieces by Bernstein, Shorter, Hancock, Hutcherson, Carla Bley, even the late Paul Desmond. Despite his influences, Turner's lines develop in markedly individual, unexpected, but logical ways; he's also the group's fulcrum, with Kevin Hays (piano), Kurt Rosenwinkel (guitar), Larry Grenadier (bass) and, especially, drummer Brian Blade, marvellously responsive to his central role.
By Ray Comiskey
Various: The Lost Sessions, (Blue Note)
Blue Note's successful formula was based on the calibre of its performers and on the fact that it paid for rehearsal time. It didn't always work, hence this collection of previously unreleased leftovers from incomplete recordings from the 1960s. There are good things; an interesting Tadd Dameron session with Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Cecil Payne and Sam Rivers, a splendid Charlie Rouse outing with Freddie Hubbard and McCoy Tyner, a good-natured tenor joust between Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon, and some decent solos from Ike Quebec on a session otherwise rendered comatose by an off-form Duke Pearson. Left at that, this would be an interesting footnote to a great label's past, but there's also too much essentially R&B material added to pad it out. Strictly for the curious.
By Ray Comiskey