WHEN I first heard Seldon Powell, I enthused,
because the boy from Brooklyn was such a happythrowback to the great days of the tenor saxophone.
Tone and taste and a consummate ease on his
horn, these were his virtues — and they stili are.
The ability to make everything swing, that too.
And no particular school ties, but just a fine blow-
ing tenorman with a simple, smooth, and compelling
modern style of his own.
The Powell Style? A new school, maybe? A
new sound that everybody will have to pick up on
to stay au courant in jazz? No, schools are not made
this way, only individuals. For the components of
the Seldon Powell style are gifts, not gimmicks.
They cannot be bought or sold, picked up or put
down, and though perhaps they can be imitated,
it will only be by a similarly well endowed musician.
Most notable of the Powell talents, it seems to me,
is the ceaseless flow of melodic inspiration. Simple
enough stuff, I suppose, but so felicitously put to-
gether that one’s attention stays riveted to his lines,
bar after bar. Sometimes it’s a countermelody. Some-
times it’s the tune itself, superlatively re-accented
or de-accented to give it a sinuous new shape. Some-
times it’s a fill-in, a cadenza. Sometimes it’s a brief
introduction to a solo, sometimes the wispiest of
codas. But in every case, there is no doubt about
the defining element: it’s the melodic line. Seldon
thinks and plays that way, consecutively, note after
note, in forward melodic motion, and that’s the way
one hears him. The impulse to move ahead with
him, in his performances, is always clear, often de-
lightful, and upon occasion, nothing less than breath-
taking. There are such occasions in this set, several
of them.
The ballads are particularly persuasive here. As
is so often the case with a first-rate practitioner of
the jazz art, especially on one of the reeds, this
is where authority, or lack of it, proclaims itself.
In a slow tune, a man’s control of his instrument
is fully exposed. And so too are his melodic and
harmonic and rhythmic resources on clear and open
display. If he falters, there is no vast parade of
notes to cover up the fluff. If his time is off, it’s
spelled out, inflection after inflection. If his ideas
are thin, shabby, banal — in any way common-
place — they shout their emptiness, no matter how
restrained or low in volume the performance.
Seldon’s ballad-blowing, perhaps needless to say
after such a set of distinctions has been made, is
superb,
In Sleepy Time Down South and She's Funny
That Way, you can hear his great ease in the
familiar, the tried and very true, as the tunes are
adhered to but not slavishly. In I'l] Close My Eyes,
you can follow Seldon’s impeccable sense of time,
which puts what is an unforgiveably tortuous tune in
the wrong hands and mouth into precise, slowly
swinging place.
In Billy Strayhorn’s tender A Flower Is A Lone-
some Thing, the equivalent of a Debussy piano pre-
lude is improvised by the tenorman, in one of his
most fluent exhibits of unwavering tone and clearly
constructed melodic line.
Up-tempo and middle-tempo, Seldon Powell is
a distinguished tenorman too. It would be hard for
him not to be a swinging one with the kind of
rhythmic support he is given here. Freddie Greene's
guitar is the reliable thing it has always been. Aaron
Bell’s bass complements Freddie steadily, throughout
the collection. On piano, Roland “Hac” Hanna man-
ages a solo line, a rhythm-section chord — what-
ever is demanded of him — with similar profession-
al polish. And presiding at the drums is one or
another of those redoubtable Johnson boys, Osie or
Gus, either one of whom can always be depended
upon for a contagious beat — infectious to all,
musicians and audience alike — without any egregi-
ous lapses in taste. For the record, it’s Osie on tracks
1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 on the first side, and again on the
second, third, and fifth tracks of the second side.
As much a part of the proceedings as the rhythm
section when the tempos start marching is Jimmy
Cleveland on trombone. He matches the exuberance
of Seldon in Undecided and Button Nose and Missy’s
Melody. He helps keep Biscuit For Duncan and
11th Hour Blues groovy and manages with Seldon
an attractive unison sound in Lolly Gag and a bright
canonic intro to Missy’s measures. In Wood’n You,
he helps recall one of the lovliest moments of the
early years of bop, a Dizzy Gillespie piece that has
lost none of it’s freshness over the years and makes
a splendid vehicle for everybody in the Seldon
Powell group to ride — brightly and with an un-
mistakable beat. Its scalar lines are once more put
to good use, as so much of high jazz quality is in
this impressive second outing as a leader by Seldon
Powell.
— BARRY ULANOV
Jimmy Cleveland performs through the courtesy of Emarcy Records.
ROOST RECORDS, 664 Tenth Avenue, New York, N. Y.
Printed in U.S.A.
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿