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Hits We Missed: Essential recordings from off the radar
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Ray Brown/Gene Harris: Soular Energy Concord 1984
You slap it. Pluck it. Make it funky. Make that bass sing. Beside you the man on the keys ripples, tinkles,rolls and bops along over top of the resonant groove you lay down. This is jive-swing heaven and these are two of the coolest cats on the block when it comes to rattlin' good rhythm and impeccably delivered melody. Call it bop, call it soul-blues, call it jazz, brother but call it cool regardless.
Ray Brown is a legendary bassist and Gene Harris is a pianist who can two-fist it with the best of them. Here they get together and lay the tunes out and what transpires is an interaction that percolates, bops and rolls at the same time that it eases upward, downward and sideways into lush ballads that have you leaning on the counter considering why it was you came to love music in the first place.
Take the A Train opens languidly with Brown's bass embellishing Harris' evocative balladry and you get the sense that this is music that wasn't so much fashioned as conjured. There's an evening's worth of disappearances here - thoughts, responsibilities, obligations, plans all vanish in the slick hocus-pocus of this jazz. By the time they segue into Sweet Gerogia Brown at the end of it all, there's nothing left but to start over again.
Life should always be this rewarding.
Antonio Carlos Jobim: Stoneflower Sbme. Special Mkts. 1970
There's a stretch of beach where time meets the sea. Both roll on eternally and there's a magic in their union, a timeless, effortless and languid rolling that you feel with the soles of your feet. Sublime. It becomes the meter you stroll this sunlit sand in. There is nowhere else to be and in the end, there's nowhere else you want to be. Simply told, you spent most of your life aiming right here, to this right now, this stretch of beach where freedom is the wash of earth, sea and sky against your senses.
Bossa nova. It's the undercurrent here. But the songs are delicate, sophisticated and mellow displaying the mastery that Jobim achieved and that Eumir Deodato underscores with impeccable arrangment and conducting. Brazil, for instance, is serpentine, lovely, mellow at the same time and there's the percussive promise of more just beyond the next bend of beach.
For a stretch of three albums at the start of the 70s - Tide, Wave and this one - Jobim defined cool. Sunflower is elegant, awash in tuneful celebration that's maybe not jazz so much as it is a declaration fo the world's rich melange of voice, of style, of texture. of verve that makes music making on this scale sunny, warm, delicate as the line where horizon meets the sea.
Jubilant, enchanting and bubbly jazz.
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