It’s not often you find a live jazz album on current release recorded in Wales. Odd but true.
This hasn’t, odds bodkins, astonishingly, been out before. It goes back to 1995 and a concert at the Brycheiniog Theatre held during that year’s Brecon Jazz Festival.
Classy with a capital C it is. That’s what’s occurring.
Sadly the bassist Ray Drummond died as recently as November.
In his playing Barron can juggle two seemingly contradictory truths, one: that the piano is 88 tuned drums when he powerfully serves deftly curveball modulations or cascades parries of tremolo so dazzlingly; and two: that tender is the night is his humane tone and register no matter the strongest of attack, unresolved the fade to grey or definitive the sign-off cadence demands.
So for fans this is a wonderful unheard memento of a player known for his work with Art Farmer, Bobby Hutcherson and Johnny Griffin among many others over a long career spent at the highest level.
The Klook and Max Roach influenced Ben Riley died in 2017. The drummer was among other things known for his work with Thelonious Monk – he is on the classics Straight, No Chaser (Columbia, 1967) and Underground (also Columbia, 1968) for instance.
With pianist Kenny Barron the sole surviving member of the trio here Riley appeared on such albums of Barron’s some also with Drummond recorded in New York at a club where they taped a few albums namechecking the spot – thus Live at Bradley’s.
Read an interesting blog by the Billie Holiday biographer Stuart Nicholson on the second of the albums the trio recorded there.
Eddie Heywood and Norman Gimbel song ‘Canadian Sunset’ which figured on the first of the Bradley’s albums is one of the tunes also here and one of the best aspects of a very enjoyable, swinging, release. Andy Williams had a hit with this “out of nowhere” love song in the 1950s, a sound slightly quaint to our ears nowadays. Barron’s instrumental on whatever version you prefer is, reliably, a whole lot more interesting certainly if you are a proper jazz fan rather than an acolyte of easy listening-erama.
Also among these Brecon gems I love the treatment of Monk’s ‘Shuffle Boil’ and the beautiful Barron composition ‘Silent Rain’ which he did a version of on 1990s album The Moment issued the year before this new live album was recorded. I prefer the 1990s version. But no matter this is still engrossing.
Monk looms large on the record and ‘Ask Me Now’ is silkily rendered and again a pleasure.
Barron, now 83, introduces the tunes. He’s a superb composer and again another highlight here is one of his – the ballad ‘Nikara’s Song’ which in the 1990s was on the album Other Places in an earlier treatment.
Broadway isn’t far away on some of the selections and no matter how many times you have heard the song ‘The Surrey With The Fringe on Top’ doesn’t pall and fits in perfectly.
Of Barron’s work I know I like his album with Dave Holland The Art of Conversation most. I’ve only heard him once live that was in 2002 at London’s QEH with his Rolls-Royce companions of Bitches Brew drummer Billy Cobham and the Second Great Miles Davis Quintet bassist Ron Carter.