Dream beside me in the midnight glow, the lamp Is low
Dream and watch the shadows come and go, the lamp Is low
Double bassist Paul Gill returns again here on this album of instrumentals.
He’s a recurring member of trumpeter Alex Norris‘ recording projects for some time – he was on Chess Moves and Fleet From the Heat.
Norris and guitarist Paul Bollenback are no strangers to one another either. The pair appeared together on saxist Ian Sims’ release Conundrum a decade ago for example and a few years later were heard together on MBASE era saxist Gary Thomas’ At Risk.
Norris isn’t that well known beyond the States as a leader even given his strong playing record.
He hails from Columbia, Maryland and graduated from Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music in 1990.
Table for Three issued by Danish straightahead stalwarts SteepleChase doesn’t have a drummer. That doesn’t matter given how rhythmic a player Bollenback is and the collective approach of the trio who maintain a convincing head bobbing triplet feel pervasively. He provides much of the essential energy of the album. But it is very middle of the road. That’s OK given the quality of the melodic paraphrasing and the way the tunes ”sing.” But if you hate well crafted tunes, beginnings, middles, ends – look away now. This is far from the madding crowd.
Bollenback solos wonderfully on the title track, a Norris composition. There are five of the fluttery trumpeter’s pieces here. The most interesting choice among the standards is a version of 1940s song ‘The Lamp Is Low,’ which is a Bert Shefter, Mitchell Parish, Peter De Rose number adapted from Ravel’s ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’
Erroll Garner covered it as ‘Pavane’ but the relevant version to us especially given how much Norris is sometimes in hock to the Art Farmer sound is the Farmer/Hall Big Blues version (CTI, 1979) that had Steve Gadd and Mike Mainieri on it when the tune was titled ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess.’
Nevertheless that treatment is hugely contrastive to what’s here given the vibes foreshadowed darkenings and proto electronica production style heard a little on Big Blues.
The version on Norris’ album itself has fast walking bass from Gill (he also bows a solo later on) and has a fetching positivity to it.
Norris should be better known – he is a very fine instrumentalist and songs make sense in his hands. We quoted Thomas Gray earlier. It’s worth doing again at the thought of obscurity.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
He’s in fine company here. His tunes are strong and that Norris, Bollenback and Gill version of ‘The Lamp is Low’ – that Carmen McRae also did a fab vocals version of on her Sarah: Dedicated to You album late in her career – is a gem and made us stick around.
