I don’t usually have jazz on in the background as it is such an active drop-everything-you-are-doing-and-concentrate listen. Focus is all.
But this is a for a focus that’s got a bigger scale to it. You can experience it as both background and foreground listening, in other words you can switch on (with a foreground raptness) to Gadabout Season or switch off (have it on in the background living with the sounds like en famille) to it. That twin facility is unusual.
Not difficult music or intensely spiritual either (although it is stylistically in that broad area) Brandee Younger knows how to play the celestial blues better than most. But you don’t need to be intimidated by the reverence.
And while the faddy interest in jazz harp has mostly passed – it reached its peak a couple of years ago – records like Gadabout Season stand on their own two feet and outlive trends.
Album of the Week on Jez Nelson and Chris Philip’s essential One Jazz this is the American’s third album for Impulse! That’s a label sometimes referred to as “The House that Trane Built” after the phrase was used in an Ashley Kahn book. Younger is fittingly playing Alice Coltrane’s harp and her contributors include on flute English jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings who adds a certain Satie-like grace on ‘End Means’ that Younger responds to very exactingly and brings her own sense of space to. Poise, flow and above all gracefulness win the day.
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