At a glance
Pastoral vision and a pristine melodic grasp:
The title track comes right at the beginning of this jazz guitar led gentle affair. Fronted by 49-year-old guitarist Nate Radley with his Puzzle People 3 plus Gary Versace, earlier albums of the American’s include quartet album Morphoses that included saxophone in the sound a decade ago.
But there’s no sax here on this Danish SteepleChase release, a label Radley issued the similarly sax-accoutred Carillon on out the year before Morphoses.
Laidback and unshowy
The great drummer Adam Nussbaum, one of the Puzzle People 3, an album that got lost on release a bit during the Covid years, known for his work with John Scofield, The Impossible Gentlemen and in recent years Linley Hamilton, really enhances what is happening here and while laidback and unshowy you can feel the subtleties of pulsar shift and movement a great deal that emanates from his consummate study of touch and feel.
On piano it’s Gary Versace and on bass again from Puzzle People, Jay Anderson.
Radley and Versace have worked together a good deal and for SteepleChase Snapshots came out last year. Versace’s best contributions here are the reveries he conjures in his soloing on ‘Just Enough’ the last of these nine tracks which are all Radley compositions. Clearly there is a lot of empathy between the two.
Perfect for reflection
I kept thinking John Abercrombie all the time in terms of mood if not always style given that Radley could be compared to quite a few top players easily enough and when I stopped listening here went to put on a Abercrombie/Holland/DeJohnette classic from the 1970s, Gateway.
While apt this is more pastoral and less jazz-rock in nature than what Gateway were about. There’s some delicious balladry most of all on ‘Above the Blue.’
As a player Radley has a wonderful melodic touch and manages to make even the most oblique of harmonic choices communicable. He’s an associate professor at Berklee in Boston and on that top music college’s website he gives some indications as to his approach in general terms:
“As a solo artist I have tried to maintain a connection to certain musical ideas that I feel are personal to me, but the truth of the matter is that I like a lot of different styles of music and have been fortunate to play in a lot of different types of projects.”
That pluralistic and open minded attitude serves the listener well on Say It’s So, an album where jazz affirmation and a certain burning intensity in its best passages are built into the whole brand from the title down.
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