One of the best gigs I have attended in the last decade was back in 2018. That was by American tenor saxophone player, influential educator, composer and inspiration Jerry Bergonzi. I have been thinking of it a lot this year.
That’s mainly because of – way before hearing this current record under review – I chanced across an amazing record in the same vein by Michael Buckley, the Irish tenor sax player. It’s called Ebb and Flow.
The source of that shared smile in the sound, expressivity in the timbre, flood of improvisational ideas around solid melody and modern jazz chord changes, is in fine fettle. It’s a slightly maudlin affair that balks at sentimentality but is served up with a minor feel. What a savoury rather than sickly overly melodic veneer it presents. The not at all stodgy tempi and vivid period feel you admire maybe most if a lover of 1950s and 60s bop derived jazz. It’s like stepping into the lobby of a beautiful hotel, loving the feel of real leather seats in a vintage car or gazing at a motor in a showroom you can only ever dream of owning but say to yourself, “one day.”
But anyway without losing the run of myself entirely back to the Bergonzi gig. It was in Soho at the Pizza quite a while before the place was refurbished and it was the first of two shows that Friday night. One of the first things I remember that the Gonz did when he got on to the stage was sip on a glass of red wine: the next more significant thing a tune later, Jobim’s ‘Wave’ as it happened, was to roll up his sleeves.
He was with pianist Bruce Barth that night playing things like Monk’s ‘Light Blue’ rolling into Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Daydream’. The Pizza roused to a rollicking account of John Coltrane’s ‘Moment’s Notice’, and then the ultimate ballad ‘Body and Soul’, the Gonz, hair slicked back, boyish smiles lighting up the place as the set went on, not one to stand on ceremony even quipping as he introduced the encore “Someone I know calls it ‘Buddy and Sol’. I’ll refer to that someone by his initials — ‘Adam Nussbaum’!”
So the format piano trio backing (Barth, with that distant evening’s bassist Mark Hodgson and drummer Stephen Keogh) is conceptually the same as here with a Danish trio led by pianist Carl Winther and issued on bassist Anders Mogensen‘s label AMM – the personnel completed by double bassist Rune Fog-Nielsen.
A few tunes long time Gonz fans will know. So ‘Czech Mate’ was on Extra Extra. Fog-Nielsen solos interestingly on this track. On ‘Pancakes Don’t Come From the Sky’ the bassist does a good deal of “walking” in the style of Dutch master Joris Teepe it struck me.
Anyway, ‘Tilt’ goes back to an album of the same name. Sonically the mix is mellow, the sound feels very lived in. There is precious little information about the release. Reader I looked around. But I will add some more details if more emerge to pore over.
In general terms I’d say it’s a good evening listen rather than a morning one. As a writer Bergonzi knows what he wants. He’s a romantic. ‘Jab’ is incredible, so beautiful and tender and fragile and all the things you want if you share that emotion. You can vicariously share the pleasure of a lost golden age of the music lovingly brought to be again.
Some words of Frank O’Hara spring to mind breaking off to read them in the 1960s poem ‘Ave Maria’. It’s the thought of things one might discover later in life like movies your parents wouldn’t let you see when you were young. That gnawing feeling of missing out back as a curious child. But what ever happened to “the soul/that grows in darkness” anyway?
In a sense it’s such imaginings imagistically illuminated on this record by players who have a feel for it. The piano accompaniment throughout is very empathetic and Winther isn’t a dissimilar player to Bruce Barth. Mogensen is steady and unshowy. Above all Bergonzi knows how to take a tune for a walk and you get lots of interesting scalar ideas and pentatonic work-outs, diving into areas Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane navigated so world shatteringly.
Now in his late-seventies the Gonz passion is still there however subdued you hear him on albums such as this ripe plum. Classy, a bit mournful in places, elegant: picnic by its roadside. There’s so much sense to what all involved do as they transform technique into feeling, that riddle the imagination wrestles and cajoles into being. They don’t need a compass, satnav or Google Maps. But they find their way to the soul of things every time.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
