Hank Jones Essence

Bob Brookmeyer - Mosaic Select 9 (2004) {3CD Set, Mosaic Records MS-009 rec 1954-1958}
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© 1954-58, 2004 Mosaic Records / EMI Music | MS-009
Jazz / Cool / West Coast Jazz / Trombone

The Bob Brookmeyer volume in the Mosaic Select series is one of the more enlightening issues in that it not only includes his little-known debut quartet sides for Pacific Jazz in 1954, featuring Red Mitchell, but more importantly, brings back into print his classic Traditionalism Revisited, Street Swingers, and Kansas City Revisited albums from 1957 and 1958. These sides in particular showcased Brookmeyer's fantastic compositional and arrangement skills even better than his work with Gerry Mulligan. Some of the players on these sessions include Jimmy Giuffre, Jim Hall, Ralph Pena, Jimmy Raney, Paul Quinichette, and Dave Bailey. Brookmeyer was a complete traditionalist, but an unusual harmonist.

Dave Holland's quintets and big bands have set a new high standard for modern mainstream and progressive jazz since the late '90s. While not a new assertion, and considering his entire body of work, Holland has time and time again proven his compositional theorems as valid, accessible, ever interesting, and especially memorable. Using a sextet, upright bassist Holland sets the bar even higher, adding the always tasteful pianist Mulgrew Miller and a four-horn front line that is relentless. This group continues to define jazz perfectly in the 21st century.

Pay the Devil, an album-long foray into country music, shouldn't come as a surprise to Van Morrison fans. It's a logical extension of his love affair with American music. Certainly blues, R&B, soul, and jazz have been at the forefront, but one can go all the way back to the Bang years and find "Joe Harper Saturday Morning," or songs on Tupelo Honey that touch country. More recently, You Win Again, with Linda Gail Lewis, offered two Hank Williams tunes and "Crazy Arms." The Skiffle Sessions with Lonnie Donegan offered traditional Southern tunes including Jimmie Rodgers' "Mule Skinner Blues." Morrison's lyrics have also referenced country music blatantly. Pay the Devil comes from direct sources of inspiration: his father's skiffle band and Ray Charles' historic forays into country on the two volumes of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962. The evidence lies in three cuts on this disc, all of which Charles recorded: Curley Williams' "Half as Much," Art Harris and Fred Jay's "What Am I Livin' For," and Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart."

The focus of this exciting, if imperfect, CD is a 1973 reunion of Gene "Jug" Ammons and Sonny Stitt, who were responsible for some of the most famous tenor saxophone battles of the 1940s and early '50s. When the two locked horns, it was musical sportsmanship at its finest. Jug and Stitt had a mutual respect for one another, and their battles were the essence of friendly competition.