Recent releases reviewed

WAYNE ESCOFFERY
Intuition Nagel Heyer
*****

This is up another level from Escoffery's auspicious 2001 Times Change. If you want labels, it's hard bop with a contemporary harmonic and rhythmic sensibility, but done with panache, skill and considerable imagination. Escoffery, on tenor and soprano, wrote most of the material and surrounded himself with quality; Jeremy Pelt, possibly the best to emerge on trumpet in recent years, plays supremely well and ensures the leader is pushed merely to hold his own, while Rick Germanson, Gerald Cannon and Ralph Peterson, on piano/fender, bass and drums are simply superb. Escoffery's wife, Carolyn Leonhart, guests on I Should Care. www.nagelheyer.com

Ray Comiskey

MIKE GARRICK
Big Band Harriott Jaza
****

In a labour of love, hommage and adventure, Garrick has revisited the music of the late, great Jamaican altoist, Joe Harriott, linking his "freeform" small group world with the structures and formal demands of the big band. Listening takes some adjustment at first, but Garrick has managed to create the conditions for individual and collective "free" blowing without allowing it to descend into incoherence, or diluting the calibre of his own orchestral writing. Soloists and ensemble players in the "freeform" passages operate in the certainty of their ultimate destination; how they get there is up to them. What emerges is crisply played, fresh and surprising; even the hard-to-please Harriott might have given it his blessing.

Ray Comiskey

DAVID MACKENZIE/JOSH JOHNSTON
A Minor Happiness Shandon
***

These nicely played duets by Mackenzie and Johnston are a rather sentimental, nostalgic amalgam of Stephane Grappelli's so-called "gypsy" jazz and the popular music of the 1920s and '30s, with a dash of blues and Jewish melancholy. It's best caught, paradoxically, in their own charming originals. Their classical background - Mackenzie is principal second violin with the NSO, pianist/composer Johnston a graduate of the popular music school of Salford University - is evident in the care they take with the linear and harmonic nature of each piece. However, their rhythmic approach lacks the flexibility jazz musicians bring to bear on the idiom, and the music could do with a jazz musician's creatively adventurous irreverence towards the material. But nostalgia seems more to the point here than jazz. www.davidandjosh.com

Ray Comiskey