Chris Davis

Trumpeter Chris Botti's To Love Again: The Duets picks up where his stellar 2004 release When I Fall in Love leaves off, with more gorgeously lush and heartfelt orchestral jazz via the London Session Orchestra. This time showcasing guest vocalists – as well as a handful of instrumental tracks – Botti takes an even more classicist approach than before and once again brings to mind such iconic jazz albums as Clifford Brown with Strings and Miles Davis' Porgy and Bess. Largely known as a smooth jazz artist with a sweet trumpet tone, it wasn't until When I Fall in Love that Botti dropped the smooth jazz synthesizers and pop-oriented compositions in favor of Gil Evans-style jazz orchestrations and an acoustic backing quartet.

A monumental innovator, icon, and maverick, trumpeter Miles Davis helped define the course of jazz as well as popular culture in the 20th century, bridging the gap between bebop, modal music, funk, and fusion. Throughout most of his 50-year career, Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. It was a style that, along with his brooding stage persona, earned him the nickname "Prince of Darkness." However, Davis proved to be a dazzlingly protean artist, moving into fiery modal jazz in the '60s and electrified funk and fusion in the '70s, drenching his trumpet in wah-wah pedal effects along the way.

Guy Davis has developed into a consummate bluesman. He's listened hard to classic Delta blues and based his style on it, without ever becoming a carbon copy of the greats. Instead they're his jumping-off point into something as individual as "Layla, Layla," where didgeridoo makes an appearance, or the poignant "Joppatowne." Equally adept on guitar, banjo, and harmonica, he's become a force of nature, with the ability to write a song like "I Don't Know" that sounds as if it had come directly from the '30s, alongside covers of Fred McDowell, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sleepy John Estes. The originals and older work mesh perfectly, the sign of a real bluesman. And, of course, he's capable of working the other side of the coin to blues, in gospel, as the closer, "God's Unchanging Hand," clearly shows. This is the tradition reborn and revitalized. Davis' support is wonderfully sympathetic, but he's completely at the center of things, the motivator and mover of this music, and a purveyor of the real blues. His lineage is obvious, and he's the new generation, doing it right and keeping it real.

With each new release, the clothes of an old bluesman fit Guy Davis more and more comfortably. By now the blues are completely a part of who he is, so when he reworks an old Sleepy John Estes song into the opener, "Limetown," it feels completely natural; even with the familiar "Rollin' And Tumblin'" riff. He mixes it up well between covers and originals, taking in quite a range – there's John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, and Blind Lemon Jefferson all sitting amicably together in his style; as well as some pieces like "Step It Up And Go" that are just plain old. His own material is less familiar, of course, but just as good, with the careful (if not wholly accurate) patina of age about it. Perhaps the best thing about Davis is that he never tries to be something he's not; there's no fake Southern accent. What you hear is what you get. And while he's hardly the guitar genius that Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were, he's more than adequate, and his excellent band backs him up solidly and subtly, never stepping out too far. There's plenty of talent in Davis, but there's also an obvious and deep love for the blues, especially the rural country blues, and he brings to his music a real timelessness. The man just keeps getting better and better.

The story about there being more suicides around the holidays turns out to be a myth, but like all urban legends, it caught on among the populace (or at least among lazy journalists) because it sounds like it should be true; as trumpeter Chris Botti writes in a sleeve note to his seasonal collection, December, "At no other time of the year is there a wider array of emotions than the month of December." This is a clue that Botti, in acceding to his record company's request that he undertake a Christmas album, was not interested in simply celebrating the season in his interpretations of holiday standards. There have been other such contemplative Christmas records: George Winston's album, also called December, is calm rather than celebratory, and Barbra Streisand's Christmas Memories, released in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, is another collection that takes in the season's complexities.

Born into a family of accomplished musicians, jazz bass player Chris Minh Doky seeked to become a doctor. His Danish mother is a former pop singer and his Vietnamese father is a classical guitarist and medical doctor. Out of boredom Chris started playing classical piano when he was six years old. In the few years that followed he won three awards at the Royal Danish Conservatory for Classical Music. When he was fifteen, he picked up the electric bass by accident. Two years later Doky started playing the upright bass as a result of hearing the Miles Davis album, My Funny Valentine. A year later the Royal Danish Conservatory for Contemporary Music gave the young musician a reward for his accomplishments with the upright bass…

Trumpeter Chris Botti drops the synthesizers and drum loops of his previous effort, Thousand Kisses Deep, for a more elegant and traditional sound on When I Fall in Love. While Thousand Kisses Deep maximized Botti's penchant for mixing perfect pop songs with his Miles Davis-influenced jazz style, it nonetheless featured many of the electronic and processed sounds predictable on modern smooth jazz releases. By eschewing such "go to" pop-jazz production techniques as drum machines and synthesized strings in favor of the real instruments here, Botti ironically sounds utterly groundbreaking on what is ultimately a straight-ahead orchestral jazz album. While nowhere near as improvisationally adventurous as its predecessors, When I Fall in Love is still a revelation in the tradition of Sketches of Spain, Clifford Brown With Strings, and Wynton Marsalis' Hot House Flowers. Mixing standards and contemporary pop tunes all in a straight-ahead style, Botti gives his minimalist Miles-ian horn sound a chance to breath and be enjoyed on its own.