A Great Transitional Jimmy Giuffre album.
Andy | PA, USA | 07/08/2006
(4 out of 5 stars)
"If you're a fan of Jimmy Giuffre's later work with the various trios, you'll find this album interesting. The playing is great, naturally, and the recording is clean, intimate, and pretty much reverb-free - a beautiful sounding record. The group sounds a little restrained, and you can hear, I think, a little tentativeness in the undertaking, which is this: it was the first record where Mr. Giuffre shunned the sounding of the beat. By 1955, a lot of jazz records featured players striving to sound over the bass and drums, who were laying down 4/4 like the timekeeper on the slave galley in "Ben Hur." Jimmy Giuffre's own work with swinging bands like Shorty Rogers' outfit took place, I think brilliantly, in that structure, ubiquitous until at least the mid-fifties. (One of the only groups I can think of that thought outside that particular box was the Red Norvo Trio of the early fifties, with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus.) Here, the bass isn't "walking" and the drums only play fills and accents. Mr. Giuffre realized the dispensable role of the drums in this framework, and his later groups are all sans drums. I like his Jimmy Giuffre 3 albums a lot, and the trio of 1961, with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow is quietly electrifying to me. My favorite lineup, though, was the trio that appeared at Newport in '58 (and plays in the opening credits of "Jazz On a Summer's Day," the beautiful film made of some of those concerts.) It's Jim Hall (guitar) and Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone), and the interplay there is phenomenal. That said, I picked this up on lp (see the attatched scan) on vacation this summer, and it is a very catchy album. One "clinker", in my opinion, is "the Leprechaun." But otherwise full of Mr. Giuffre's evocative, engaging ideas. It's a solid and entertaining effort, the more so, when you remember when and in what jazz climate it was created."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1