Just when you are about to give up on jazz vocals, along comes an album that re-invigorates your heart. The team of Amy London/sop, Darmon Meader/ten, Dylan Pramuk/b and Holli Ross/alto sing a song of bebop as they mix their harmony and solo virtuosity with the Mount Rushmore of Bopsters in Mark Murphy, Bob Dorough, Jon Hendricks, Sheila Jordan and Annie Ross. Accompanied by the sharp skinned team of Steve Schmidt/p, Sean Smith-Cameron Brown/b, Steve Williams/dr, Steven Kroon/perc and Roni Ben-Hur/g, the singers mix and match like it’s “Throwdown with Bobby Flay.”
The younger team are as adroit and overflowing with bubbling energy, and even better is the fact that all of the “oldtimers” sound unstrained and as hip as hep can be. Dorough has made a living sounding like a whispering old codger, so he fits right in on “Nothing Like You Has Ever Been Seen Before,” while Sheila Jordan works well on Horace Silver’s Peace.” Hendricks slips in like one of the Four Brothers on Gigi Gryce’s “Music in the Air” with Pramuk, London and Meador, and Ross stays comfortably within herself on “Music is Forever.” The real treat is hearing Mark Murphy, who just recently passed on, making this his last recording; he’s affirmative and agile with a voice that was still muscular to the end as he delivers a take of “Red Clay” that is as souful as anything The Hub ever did with it. His timing on the seductive “Senor Blues” and “Chasin’ The Bird” is as bright as the lights on 52nd Street, and his duet with Holli Ross on “Boplicity” as so cool it’s hot.
It takes something as energetic as this album to make you realize how limp and stale so much of today’s sounds are. Where did we make the wrong turn?
Motema Records