Rahsaan Barber photo credit: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This slips down very easily. New from American saxophonist Rahsaan Barber, 46, who hails from Nashville and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it’s urgent, authorial, tenor saxophone soaked in hard bop and beyond. But Barber is no beginner and experience shows. So if you are looking for meretricious novelty and flavour of the day ephemerality, sorry, nothing to see here.
The American has been around the block a few times with some half a dozen albums to his name already. Here he is with guitarist Ted Ludwig, pianist Matt Endahl, bassist Kevin Beardsley and drummer Joshua Hunt. Ludwig’s contributions stand out most in the backing sound and are part of why the album works so well in its fabric stitched in underneath the declarative saxophone lead.
Released on Barber’s own Jazz Music City label, what you will discover should you choose to listen is a straightahead and blues inflected modern jazz amalgam. If you are into what Christian McBride does, the shelter of the shade of the cedar tree counts here too as a kind of future proofed signifier stylistically in some of the writing.
Barber is partly a Stanley Turrentine kind of player. That side of his playing is dialled down a bit but it’s still there on some of the more characterful passages on this new record. Check RB out on earlier Turrentine homage the rollicking ‘Song for Stanley T’ going back more than 20 years to his own album, TrioSoul.
I’d choose ‘Sanctuary at Seaside’ and the feelgood ‘Cabbage’ as the standout tracks of this latest album just released – the latter reprised at the end as if there wasn’t quite enough material to fill the album out.
The whole thing is easy to digest on a first listen without being at all overly toothsome and I’ll go back to it over the weekend for repeat play – it’s people pleasing jazz without making too many compromises.
Barber, among his siblings, has a twin brother, trombonist Roland Barber and both musicians were named after saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-77). Dr Barber studied at Indiana University under the ex-George Russell Stratusphunk trombonist David Baker (1931-2016), before completing a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music and later completing a doctorate in classical saxophone at the University of Memphis. Sadly Barber and his wife, classical saxophonist Heidi Radtke, suffered the unexpected loss of a pregnancy that was to be their first child, a daughter. Through loss Eternal finds something deep inside that speaks to the world.
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