Kenny Barron, The Source, Artwork/PIAS ****

What an event release. It is some 32 years since Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume 10 was issued - a Concord album recorded in California and remarkably Kenny Barron's last solo piano representation. Thelonious Monk's 'Well You Needn't' was in …

Published: 30 Jan 2023. Updated: 14 months.

What an event release. It is some 32 years since Live at Maybeck Recital Hall, Volume 10 was issued - a Concord album recorded in California and remarkably Kenny Barron's last solo piano representation.

Thelonious Monk's 'Well You Needn't' was in Barron's repertoire boisterously delivered back then and returns here ever so playfully. Monk's 'Teo' receives a stomping stride passage snuck deliciously in.

The 79-year-old Philadelphia born NEA Jazz Master's evanescent 'Phantoms' - a composition that goes back to 1980s album What If? and draws out echoes of a rich AfroCuban tradition that feeds so much modernistic jazz since bebop - is also here on this Théâtre d'Athénée, Paris, July 2022 recording among Barron's deeply appealing standards (original 'Sunshower' on the Maybeck release is also reprised with huge gravitas - it goes back to the 1970s and a Sonny Fortune Awakening treatment). Linger, savour - The Source will make your day. The CD version is out on 3 March.

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Ed Cherry, Are We There Yet? Cellar Live ***1/2

Some one said: ''The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.'' Precisely, and they are that which we know. – T. S. Eliot Apply notions of tradition and the individual talent to jazz, why not. There's nothing …

Published: 30 Jan 2023. Updated: 14 months.

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Some one said: ''The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.'' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

– T. S. Eliot

Apply notions of tradition and the individual talent to jazz, why not. There's nothing pretentious here or over-demanding for the listener beyond proper gratitude for the conjuring of a certain contentedness. Custom made for lounge listening in a proper jazz club that knows against the odds and sage counsel of the TikTok generation programmers that it is still cool to play 1960s-esque soul jazz Are We There Yet folds in the classic sound of Kansas City born Blue Note organist Big John Patton (1935-2002) a sound that you used to hear a lot during the acid jazz era - acid jazz being a mostly London DJ rebranding of gems from the earlier definitive soul jazz days.

A new version of 'Ding Dong' from Patton's Understanding is here working wonders. Ex-Dizzy Gillespie player guitarist Ed Cherry, Kyle Kohler crucially on Hammond B3 and drummer Byron ‘Wookie’ Landham plus vibist Monte Croft do the vital necromancy. Hard bop paterfamilias, the ultimate primus inter pares Jeremy Pelt, produces and acts as séance master. If anything the new version is even bouncier and dammit zanier than the original. Landham keeps the style of Understanding's Harold Walker closely in mind. If you like Nigel Price on the UK scene then Wes' 'Mr Walker' is where Cherry is closest to His Nigeness. Carla Bley's 'Lawns' from the 1980s gets covered a lot these days and yet has not reached saturation point and fits in well with the much earlier period feel that dominates here.

Cedar Walton's 'The Holy Land' that first surfaced blissfully on the David 'Fathead' Newman Atlantic album House of David in 1967 has a superb organ intro from Kohler but overall the cover isn't a patch on Newman's or for that matter Milt Jackson's late period mastery exhibited on The Harem. You win some you lose some especially when the bar is set as high as it is on this album overall. So to wrap and cut the chat to a minimum: think when you are down at the crossroads and stare at the signs going different places seemingly that say in faded paint ''Art'' one way and lit up in a bright colour ''Entertainment'' another and you are too unsure to know which to choose here you realise that they may be different roads but they go eventually - somehow - to the same place of infinite pulchritude.