I Ain’t Lookin’ at You
Alvin Queen
Enja/Justin Time
Betcha Bottom Dollar
The Puppini Sisters
Verve
We Could Make Such Beautiful Music Together
Bebo Valdes & Federico Britos
Calle54
There’s jazz that just makes you stop and listen because of its quiet certainty and sincerity. It doesn't try to wow you, and it wows you partly because of that.
Take, for instance, “Contemplation,” the McCoy Tyner tune on drummer Alvin Queen’s exceptional new CD, I Ain’t Lookin’ at You. Queen—a onetime teen prodigy in the Bronx now living in Europe—provides the aural architecture for his talented quintet-mates: Terell Stafford on trumpet and flugel, Jesse Davis on alto sax, Mike LeDonne on the Hammond B3, and Peter Bernstein on guitar. The lineup is characteristic of the Prestige soul-jazz sound of the 60s and 70s. Its modern classic quality echoes Queen’s sterling resume, including work with Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, and Oscar Peterson, as well as Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard, and the Marsalis brothers. But it speaks lightly and freshly, not like history.
This disc would be worth buying for the title track alone, which is by Davis, and which the group doesn’t play so much as ride. In the wrong hands, an outspoken Hammond is a dangerous thing. It can be obnoxious. But LeDonne here treats it like a sports car on a fun showoffy roll through town. Davis's solo is jokey and cheerily punctuated. Stafford is cautious at first, then gets just a little giddy, before Bernstein downshifts back to home.
“Seven Steps to Heaven” gives Queen the spotlight to demonstrate his understated versatility in a tempo-taffy opening solo.
Davis offers a lyrical, envelope-pushing solo on the soulful “Shirley’s Song,” written by LeDonne, with vibrato turning to bent notes before Stafford arrives in a muted, mellow manner.
Horace Silver’s “Nutville” features a scene-setting percussion tableau by Queen that calmly spins into a gorgeous blue cymbal-silhouetted horn intro.
Don Patterson’s "Mellow Soul" is a delicious soft-strutting blues, a nice book end to match the Shirley Scott opener, “There’s Blues Everywhere.”
Queen's scheduled to play soon with Oscar Peterson’s combo and with the drummer’s own Alvin Queen & Organics. This May, Germany gets him in a series of gigs, but we can hope he visits nearer the old neighborhood before long. For more background and updated schedules, check out his Web site.
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Coming next month is the American debut album of the fun London trio The Puppini Sisters. Inspired by a 40s-style group in the French animated movie The Triplets of Belleville, singers Marcella Puppini, Kate Mullins, and Stephanie O’Brien met at the Trinity College of Music. They channel the Andrews Sisters and it would be downright unnatural for them not to sing numbers like “Mr. Sandman” and “Jeepers Creepers.” They do a nice scaled-down “In the Mood” too, but also meld genres and decades in delivering clever arrangements of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” and the Smiths’ “Panic.” They’re backed by fine instrumentalists like Benoit Charest on guitar and Roger Walls on bugle, to name just a couple.With their period outfits, they could become popular mainstays on the postmodern lindy circuit, or a sort of club novelty act. Who’s to argue? But it would be more fun to see them hack through the period play and mold their own distinctive musical world, beyond the admittedly cunning mix and match here.
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I’ve become entranced with a gorgeous ’06 nostalgic release on the Calle54 label: Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdes, with violinist Federico Britos, on We Could Make Such Beautiful Music Together. Valdes was once pianist and arranger for the house band at Havana’s Tropicana, but when Castro took the country, Valdes fled, leaving behind a wife and five children, and eventually settled in Stockholm. Uruguay-born Britos is a name in both the symphony and jazz worlds, and also a composer.Here they luxuriate in standards by Gershwin, Kern, and Bill Evans, but also sample Latin numbers like Ernesto Lecuona's "Noche Azul," Antonio Carlos Jobim’s "Luiza," and Chucho Valdes’s "Claudia."
Valdes, in his late 80s, worked for years as a lounge pianist in Sweden, where he has a second family. On one hand, travesty, yes? On the other hand, he’s remained steadily doing what he is on earth to do, so it could have been far worse.
He and Britos make beautiful music indeed, and listening to it is like being handed a refreshing mojito on a breezy evening and being invited into the intimate impromptu living-room recital of two old, close friends. You could decry the cruel winds of politics and fate and wish the world otherwise, and who could blame you. Or you could raise your glass and toast to love songs, persistence, survival, and exquisite musical company, which this surely is.
-A.C.K.
