Meeting of minds on an enduring jazz partnership cutting it live
Formidable instrumentalists
While I think this album could do with having a bit more impact there’s a whole lot to like here. A few weeks ago I saw the co-leader left handed double bassist Joris Teepe play in the same venue as this live album was made in a band led by trombone great Conrad Herwig. But it’s been many years since I have heard saxist-flautist Don Braden and by coincidence that was also in the Pizza Express Jazz Club in London’s Soho. Both players are formidable instrumentalists who know how to thrive on riff-groove alchemy in a modern-jazz setting that values the ability to swing and to conjure a blues connotation.
It may be counterintuitive to suggest given that while the album finds the American player Braden mainly on saxophone that the track featuring his flute playing is the best of all but that is, according to taste and let’s go out on a limb to say, the case.
Flying Dutchman Teepe, born in 1962, is a graduate of the Amsterdam Conservatory who then moved to New York in the 1990s not long after progressing out of the conservatory.
The pair are frequent collaborators
He has approaching a dozen and a half albums under his own name or co-led and has worked with Don Braden a good deal.
Braden, an alumnus of Harvard, was in Wynton Marsalis’ band as far back as the 1980s – check out the formidable ‘Juan’ he’s on from that era above – and later that decade played a lot with Freddie Hubbard. High profile albums of Braden’s include RCA release The Fire Within released at the end of the 1990s around about the time when we heard him play live.
With Teepe records include 1990s Mons Records quintet release Pay as You Earn and Conversations more recently with Matt Wilson and Gene Jackson plus the likeable In the Spirit of Herbie Hancock.
On this new live recording co-produced by Braden with Dave O’Higgins the Teepe-Braden pairing are teamed with pianist Mātyās Gayer and drummer Stephen Keogh who fit in well with the overall thought process.
Tunes include a lot of familiar fare: Pee Wee Ellis marvel ‘The Chicken’ introduced to the world by James Brown and later covered by Jaco Pastorius; Stevie Wonder’s ‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing’; Ray Brown’s ‘FSR’ – which is our overall pick (the initials of the piece mean ”For Sonny Rollins”) – Miles Davis classic ‘Nardis‘, the standard ‘Angel Eyes’ which is where the flute comes into its own, Horace Silver’s Song ‘For My Father’ and Braden tune ‘Eddieish (Reg Tempo)’ a tune a version of which is on the previously mentioned Conversations. So, great choices elegantly delivered.
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