Tim Whitehead: Personal Standards (Home Made)
Whitehead is an exceptional tenor who doesn't sound like anyone else. Idiomatically post-Coltrane, he has a big-toned, vocalised style and a very individual sense of solo architecture which somehow reconciles harmonic surprise with linear inevitability. On this outstanding album, with two working quartets fitting like a glove, he is magisterial; material as disparate as My Girl and a beautiful, rubato In A Silent Way, marvellous performances of Beauty And The Beast and What's Going On show both his and the group's sense of collective dynamics, as well as a lyricism as muscular as it is subtly controlled and expressed. Distribution of this small label is by New Note.
Ray Comiskey
Grant Green: Blues For Lou (Blue Note)
This previously unreleased 1960s session by the late, great Grant Green is a simple blues and gospel-drenched affair - and as unpretentious as that suggests. With Green on guitar are two of his musical buddies, well versed in this kind of down-home material - organist John Patton and drummer Ben Dixon, both of whom allow Green to settle comfortably in the groove. In fact, it's all a bit too comfortable; although Green had the time and an unmistakably evocative tone to lift any tune, as he does repeatedly and attractively here, this is basically undemanding, good-time stuff that jazzmen of this calibre could do in their sleep. For Green fans only.
Ray Comiskey