Mature Sophisticated Driving Jazz
Dr. Debra Jan Bibel | Oakland, CA USA | 04/08/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Among the recent CD issues of Art Farmer on the Arabesque label, I chose to purchase Silk Road for the selection of tunes and for the performance: only a couple well-known standards, Stardust and I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart, stand apart to some delightful lesser known and original abstract improvisations. The double saxophones of Ron Blake and Don Braden meshed with Farmer's flumpet to produce sonorous chordal melodies. Adding Geoff Keezer's fine piano work for percussive accents and solo flourishes with the rhythm section of Kenny Davis bass and Carl Allen, we get a well-matched group of jazz explorers. The recording of 1996 is engineered nicely too. Oddly, however, the case insert may have had a printing error, because nothing whatsoever is printed about the ensemble, song credits, studio production site and team. This purchase appears to be a CD-ROM on demand recording; pity that the packaging is not complete. Nonetheless, I am pleased with the recording and I enjoy the music, which is what counts."
Cutting-edge jazz by four major young stars and an elder sta
Samuel Chell | Kenosha,, WI United States | 08/13/2007
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This 1997 recording, featuring the great trumpeter at the age of 68 is, I suspect, about as late as you can go and still hope to find Art Farmer at least reasonably close to the top of his game. I've never been crazy about his custom-designed "flumpet," but it suits his quietly intense, thoughtful playing and is a break from the overused flugelhorn. "Stardust" is a nice way to remember the legendary player.
Given his supporting cast, it would be hard for Art to go wrong--young talented tigers all. Ron Blake has shown his wares not only with Farmer groups but with Roy Hargrove and on his own dates. The addition of a second tenor-soprano player seems a bit gratuitous. The two-horn frontline could do just fine. Geoff Keezer is the world-class pianist from Wisconsin who joined Art Blakey as a teen-ager, within a year or so of the great drummer's passing. Then he went with the Ray Brown trio prior to the departure of that jazz legend. And now with Farmer. Hard to say whether it's bad timing or fortunate that he had the opportunities, however limited.
Not only Keezer's solos but his arrangements, along with the audio fidelity, are compelling reasons to own this one. None of the major labels is willing to distribute recordings like this in the USA. If you want to hear present-day jazz, look to indie labels or exclusively non-American companies."
Track Listings (8) - Disc #1