All About Jazz top 10 jazz albums; Lovano, Douglas, and The Bad Plus

Sunday January 03, 2010

From Allaboutjazz.com
Courtesy of JAZZzology by Roger Watters

4. Steve Kuhn Trio w/ Joe Lovano, Mostly Coltrane (ECM).
Kuhn, a lyrical but hardly lilting pianist who briefly played with John Coltrane in 1960, aims for a gentler portrait of the tenor god, stretching the cadence, smoothing the tempo, without blunting the intensity—and, somehow, it works, especially on Trane’s spiritual chants (“Welcome”) and romantic ballads (“Central Park West”). Joe Lovano, one of the lustier (and busier) tenor players around, assumes the mantle with aplomb; Joey Baron combines some of Elvin Jones’ polyrhythmic energy and Roy Haynes’ swing-driven splash, fusing the traits of Trane’s two most prominent drummers.

6. Dave Douglas, Spirit Moves (Greenleaf Music).
The latest album from Dave Douglas’ Brass Ecstasy quintet—Douglas on trumpet, Vincent Chancey on French horn, Luis Bonilla on trombone, Marcus Rojas on tuba, and Nasheet Waits on drums—is a rouser. Like many Douglas albums, it features original tunes and Douglas-arranged pop covers (in this case, of tunes by Otis Redding, Hank Williams, and Rufus Wainwright), and it’s serious fun, a blast of burnished swing.

8. Masada Quintet, Stolas: The Book of Angels, Vol. 12 (Tzadik).
Protean composer-impresario John Zorn treks on with his Masada series—tunes, over 500 of them now, built on one of the two “Jewish scales” (a major scale with the second note flat or a minor scale with the fourth note sharp)—but this time with the peripatetic Joe Lovano playing tenor sax, instead of Zorn blowing alto, and the long-standing quartet (Dave Douglas, trumpet; Greg Cohen, bass; Joey Baron, drums) augmented by Uri Caine on piano. It’s a bit cooler, even mellower, than most Masada albums, but there’s still that high-energy blues and hora swing.

9. The Bad Plus, For All I Care (Heads Up).
This time out, the crazy-like-a-fox postmodernists of The Bad Plus—pianist-extraordinaire Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King—cover not only the likes of Kurt Cobain and the Bee Gees, but also Elliott Carter and Igor Stravinsky. A few tracks also feature a singer, Wendy Lewis, a fixture of the Minneapolis indie-rock scene who sounds a bit like Nico with wit. It’s an album of jolly and gripping surprises.

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