Saturday morning listen - best time of the week:
It has not been a brilliant year for piano trios. But things are picking up. And this Stateside trio led by bassist Vicente Archer - with Blue Note pianist Gerald Clayton and drummer Bill Stewart - …
Published: 10 Jun 2023.Updated: 40 days.
Saturday morning listen - best time of the week:
It has not been a brilliant year for piano trios. But things are picking up. And this Stateside trio led by bassist Vicente Archer - with Blue Note pianist Gerald Clayton and drummer Bill Stewart - passes the supper club test, meaning imagining whether a band can cut the mustard in a top jazz club like Ronnie Scott's. Clearly that doesn't take a lot of figuring out here. Recorded last year in a New York studio best bits include the almost baroque sense of exactitude the Glasperian Archer brings to 'Message to a Friend' which also factors in an incredibly rhapsodic solo from Clayton. Jeremy Pelt playing with Lewis Nash at Arthur's in Dublin tonight produces so as you'd expect with Pelt this is state of the art hard bop in terms of idiomatic empathy. Includes Stewart compositions Pelt tune '13/14' and Nicholas Payton's 'It Takes Two to Know One' where you can really discern Archer's timbral authority. Vicente Archer,photo: via Cellar Live on Bandcamp
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
– Oliver Sacks
TRACK OF THE WEEK: DEXTER'S TUNE
The words above were written …
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
– Oliver Sacks
TRACK OF THE WEEK: DEXTER'S TUNE
The words above were written by Oliver Sacks drawn from his 1970s book Awakenings later turned into a moving and thought provoking Hollywood film of the same name starring Robin Williams, Robert De Niro and the great tenor saxophonist who was also a fine actor Dexter Gordon (as Rolando). Dream trios flicker into view too in this thought cloud stemming from memories of the Penny Marshall directed film and the Randy Newman tune named for Dexter Gordon who was also so convincing as Dale Turner in Bertrand Tavernier's earlier Parisian jazz homage Round Midnight.
The Orrin Evans version is classic piano trio in the sense that it moves and heals you as you listen. In other words it goes beyond great instrumentalism and is a rare thing to occur on a daily basis. Awakenings, a very humane film, told the real life stories of victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic and the efforts of a doctor based on Sacks himself in the 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx by using an experimental drug that produced remarkable if highly controversial results. It all comes together perfectly on this dream trio treatment of Newman's great composition 'Dexter's Tune' led by fabulous US pianist Orrin Evans (whose Captain Black Big Band is state of the art big band) with fellow countrymen Bob Hurst from the Branford Marsalis classic quartet and the great Marvin ''Smitty'' Smith who was on the definitive MBASE Steve Coleman statement primus inter pares, 1985's Motherland Pulse.
If you want the tune with a tenor player lead taking on the running then drummer Johnathan Blake's fine version heard on The Eleventh Hour with tenorist Mark Turner not even channelling Dexter but knowing the spirit and the soul of it all playing his own individualism to the maximum in his superlative treatment is pertinent.
You will clearly realise what an amazing jazz vehicle this 1990s movie tune is and its legacy continues. As for the Randy Newman score on the original soundtrack it is beautiful too against that moving dance in the key scene of the film in which it is used and the solo piano playing of Newman himself on the piece. The Evans version is drawn from The Red Door out next week.
Later work of Sacks' that also dwelt in the way music affects people in weird and wonderful even bizarrely pathological ways is also a must read. It is called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and was published in 2007.