The benevolent shadow of Sonny Rollins is all over Three’s Up.
‘Who Cares,’ the Gershwin number Matt Garcia opens with, Sonny – who died this year – interpreted so exuberantly on 1958’s Leonard Feather produced Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass.
Why should I care?
Ira Gershwin
Life is one long jubilee,
So long as I care for you
And you care for me
– from Ira Gershwin’s words to his brother George’s melody interpreted memorably by Carmen McRae and Sammy Davis Jr on Boy Meets Girl (1957) released the year before Newk’s treatment
Another even better example: Garcia does Frederick Loewe’s Camelot (1960) song ‘If Ever I Would Leave You’ here with a “should” that Rollins did with Jim Hall adding guitar on What’s New.
Incidentally there is no sense at all as a listener that you’d wished he woulda, shoulda, coulda, done anything different because there is belief in the idiom. It’s the articulation, gruff way with melody, big sound – close your eyes and you’d even think for a minute Garcia is playing the baritone sax and not the tenor – and above all the general idiom and milieu that Three’s Up falls under.
Garcia, who is in his twenties, is from Texas, was selected for Carnegie Hall’s NYO Jazz scheme and studied at Juilliard. Here he is with double bassist Martin Wind – whose approach in context is a little like Joris Teepe‘s – and on drums it’s the former Carla Bley player Billy Drummond I heard in 2023 playing live at the Pheasantry in London with his wife singer Tessa Souter. Read a 2022 interview that I did with Billy here.
Overall my reaction to all this is that Three’s Up has strong personality, persuasive tone, great accompaniment from Wind and Drummond and the selection of tunes is very much up my strasse. Hearing Dizzy Gillespie’s nifty 1940s number ‘Ow!’ for the first time in ages on any record has just about made my day. Because the last time I heard the catchy number was on a Dave O’Higgins record with Eric Alexander called Sketchbook released as long ago as 2009. Garcia’s treatment isn’t anything like theirs, good and all though it is, which swings a bit more lightly. Three’s Up acts as an ideal introduction to start to get to know a player on the rise.
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