Ding ding. Round three.
It’s been a good year for saxophone in 2025. Belonging from Branford Marsalis tapped the Jarrett European Quartet sound.
And Eric Alexander – here with fellow saxist Vincent Herring in a different kind of context – has already impressed hugely with the dreamy Chicago to New York.
But this, not remotely pugilistic in a negative way while riffing on a boxing metaphor in the titling, shares some of the same ingredients as that Cellar Music release.
Recorded in July last year the new one is a winner on points.
The two leaders tenorist Alexander and altoist Herring have form live at Smoke (formerly Augie’s) following on from HighNote releases The Battle: Live at Smoke (2005) and Friendly Fire: Live at Smoke put out 7 years later.
Still catching up I haven’t seen Alexander live at all. And as for Herring it was ages ago at a festival in Poland in the 1990s when he was in Nat Adderley’s band playing a big hall called the Sala Kongresowa. Probably that was the first time I ever had the pleasure of hearing Adderley classic ‘Work Song’ live.
Yup he sounds a bit like Nat’s brother Cannonball. Not many can do that – Tony Kofi is the only other player I can think of in recent years who can pull off that feat. Alexander shares something in common with Scott Hamilton by contrast.
Mellow, swinging, affable – the tunes have beginnings, middles, ends and know about soulfulness. The saxists are here with pianist Mike LeDonne, bassist John Webber and drummer Lewis Nash.
Split Decision tunes include ‘Pharoah’s Dance,’ Mingus Big Band trombonist Steve Turre’s homage to Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner; Horace Silver’s ‘Strollin” and a tune Herring played with Nat Adderley that he himself also recorded on his own album Folklore: Live at the Village Vanguard that thrillingly also had Cyrus Chestnut on it, the glorious ‘Mo’s Theme.’
Hank Mobley fans will warm to the news that ‘A Peck a Sec’ and ‘Soft Impressions’ are also on the album to be released in August. I loved another version of ‘Soft Impressions’ released last year by M.T. B. and this if anything is even more laidback. (Clue: the more horizontal the better.)
Nash’s drum solo on the former of these tunes is one of the album’s various highlights. There’s good audience response which makes the album more lived in than some live albums – always better than when the sound resembles a vicar’s tea party. The big ballad feature is a flawless treatment of ‘My Romance’.
But fine words butter no parsnips? Reader, there’s nary a fear on that account, gentle cynic, understandably worried about prolix noodling or an overabundance of pat phrases littering the place. Pal, you’ll possibly be relieved to learn all that’s gone for a burton and is nowhere on display.
Herring is back in the UK in the autumn when he plays Ronnie Scott’s with a septet that features trumpet hotshot and one to hear, Joey Curreri.
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