Slam Dunk
Gerald Albright
Concord
Perhaps you were under the impression that the ‘90s revival — in music as in fashion, high art and politics — was an old story by now and had potentially even run its course. Nobody seems to have told some of the surviving paragons of smooth jazz, whose art (let’s agree to be civil here) reached its apotheosis in that era, scarcely deviating since.
Even against this conservative backdrop, saxophonist Gerald Albright has shown a remarkable adherence to form. His amiably slick new album, Slam Dunk, could basically have been sprung from a time capsule, along with some early-edition Beanie Babies and a tumbler full of pogs. You could put it another way in just two words: Peabo Bryson, the album’s only billed guest (on Where Did We Go Wrong?).
Albright, 56, has planted a flag for himself; he isn’t fumbling in the dark. He produced Slam Dunk with Chris Davis, a veteran studio man known as Big Dog, who has also worked with smooth-R&B singers like Will Downing and Brian McKnight. The album’s mechanical-sounding drum programming and airtight recording mix seem like a pitch to the base: the sort of music fan who knows implicitly that a track titled The Duke is for neither Duke Ellington nor John Wayne but rather George Duke, the keyboardist who loomed large in this realm, before he died last year.
Within these parameters, though, Albright hits his marks. On alto saxophone, his main instrument, he has an attractively mellow sound, rooted in soul and gospel and sharpened with just a hint of metallic tang. He’s also a flutist of warmth and pith — and, in a way not previously emphasized this strongly, an electric bassist fond of thumb-slapping funk. Given the title of the album, you could almost envision it as a shout to Wayman Tisdale, the NBA star turned smooth jazz bassist, who favored a similar style.
What works best on Slam Dunk are the songs that give Albright room to stretch out a bit. That happens on the title track, on a scrap of a tune called Fiesta Interlude and on The Gospel, an in-the-pocket testimonial. Less fortunate are a version of James Brown’s It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World, which feels leached of any useful tension, and a cover of True Colors, the Cyndi Lauper hit, which bears a dedication to Phil Collins (one of Albright’s former bosses) and a vocal by Selina Albright (one of his children).
Albright overdubs himself on alto, tenor and baritone saxophones on much of the album, creating a section effect like the one on Summer Horns (Concord), a recent release by Dave Koz and Friends. Albright is one of those Friends, so he has a stake in Summer Horns, which has spent more than a year on Billboard’s contemporary jazz albums chart. And however he feels about jockeying for position in the field, Albright will assuredly be aboard when Koz’s Summer Horns tour reaches the Smooth Cruise on Hornblower Infinity, its rightful place, on Aug. 14.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Business Is Bad
Karen Mantler
XtraWATT/ECM
Karen Mantler’s wry, bluntly elegant songs on Business Is Bad, her first album in 14 years, are about nuisances that nobody wants to dwell on without recourse to, at the very least, a nap. There are tunes about overdrawn bank accounts; about limitations in composing, in improvising and in learning French; about expensive lawyers; about volcanic ash disruptions to international flight patterns; and about death.
All that sounds like one big ball and chain, but Mantler, singing and playing piano and chromatic harmonica, slips free. She keeps negative forces in their place, disciplining them with persistence; humor; piano improvising so simple that it’s almost a form of Zen; and clipped, no-vibrato, contralto-range vocal phrasing - a bit like Suzanne Vega, but about 10 degrees cooler, generally doling out one note per syllable.
Since the mid-’80s, Mantler — the daughter of the jazz musicians Carla Bley and Michael Mantler — has sporadically led her own bands and made jazz-tinged art-song records with a similar kind of ultra-dry whimsy. (The last one was Karen Mantler’s Pet Project, a song cycle about seeking a new pet after the death of her cat.)
She’s a cartoonist, not an oil painter, and the dimensions of her new band suit her: Doug Weiselman on guitar and bass clarinet, and Kato Hideki on electric bass. No drums, no brass, no sonic effects other than a bit of reverb on the guitar, and no distracting virtuosity. Her songs rely on the force of her personality, and on the style of her storytelling, for lack of a better word, which can be so plain-spoken as to verge on triteness.
People die, she sings in Surviving You, the song that has the best chance to provoke traditional emotions. “It’s no big surprise.” She continues:
But when someone close to you
Is suddenly gone
It seems so unfair
Why can’t people die in pairs?
What comes across, in the words and between the lines, is the will to stay on track — to keep living, writing songs and playing, no matter the cost.
“All I can do is try my best,” she sings in My Solo, a minimal tango, one of the last tracks on the album. “Hope I don’t get lost.” She doesn’t: Her solo goes upward, evenly, half step by half step.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
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