Mar 10 2013
Boyd Lee Dunlop – “The Lake Reflections”
Stories like this next one serve as essential reminders of why we should never give up hope. It’s about pianist Boyd Lee Dunlop and his sophomore release The Lake Reflections.
Dreams and good fortune operate under their own capricious rules and, oftentimes, seem to run contradictory to what we each of us may view as pragmatism or common sense. Sometimes good things happen to us, seemingly, through no fault of our own, lacking any apparent causality, and yet confers the eminent vindication for refusing to quit.
Your album personnel: Boyd Lee Dunlop (piano).
Boyd Lee Dunlop, all of 85 years old, released his first album in 2011. Dunlop began playing piano at an early age. Living in a poor section of Buffalo, NY, he used a junked piano with missing keys that sat out in his family’s back yard. His brother, Frankie, played drums. Frankie Dunlop later went on to have a storied career as a musician, playing on classic jazz albums (and personal favorites) like Thelonious Monk’s Criss Cross and Monk’s Dream and Monk’s live Newport recording with Miles Davis, as well as on Charles Mingus’s Tijuana Moods and Sonny Rollins’ Alfie soundtrack. In the meantime, Boyd Lee stayed in Buffalo, playing the local circuit in between jobs at the steel mills. The brothers had divergent career arcs. Boyd’s path is not an uncommon one.
But then it does get a bit unusual. In his 80’s, Boyd was now living in a Buffalo nursing home and passing his time playing a junked piano with missing keys that sat in the cafeteria… a piano, ironically, that was not too far removed from the piano that he first drew notes from for the first time nearly 70 years earlier. Photographer Brendan Bannon visited the nursing home regarding an art project. However, after meeting Boyd and hearing him play, it wasn’t long before Bannon collaborated with others to get Boyd’s music back into the public sphere. The result was the 2011 release Boyd’s Blues.
With Buffalo musicians Sabu Adeyola on bass and Virgil Day on drums, the recording is a heartwarming set of straight-ahead classic jazz. Blues with soul, bop with heart, and music that could not be mistaken for anything but Jazz. The album, and Boyd’s story, got decent press, and was well received. Dan Barry wrote a nice article for the New York Times and NPR pubbed an article and on-air story on its Weekend Edition feature. Live performances were lined up. Everyone likes a story about a huge comeback, and this one was a classic.
Not long after, Boyd suffered a severe heart attack. And despite hovering close to death, Boyd has turned that setback into yet another chapter in his comeback story. After a recovery period, Boyd decided the time was ripe for his sophomore release.
A solo piano recording, the songs on The Lake Reflections are inspired by photographs Brendan Bannon took of Lake Erie. The music reflects the crisp serenity of the source material. There is a stark beauty to this music, a warm stateliness that possesses both elegance and a smile.
And where Boyd’s Blues moved at a brisk stroll, The Lake Reflections has the slow unhurried pace of a body of water on a lazy afternoon. Reminiscent of the music of fellow pianist Red Garland’s trio sessions, this is peaceful music that can fill a room with its sound, despite its unassuming, wisp-ish presence.
And it’s the music’s unhurried pace that is the album’s real charmer, in that it allows so much room for Dunlop to breathe. Moments of dramatic expressiveness are able to maintain their composure within the solo context, and changes in tempo or emotional transitions from warmth to iciness have sufficient time to develop within the expanse of time from first note to last.
And that the music moves at a casual pace, with everything that Dunlop has been through and the numerous times he justifiably may have feared that time was running thin, it supremely illustrates the plateau he’s achieved, that he can come out the other side and record an album of meditative reflection that shines so bright in its own time.
Lovely music and a great story behind it.
Self-Produced, and released on Dunlop’s and Bannon’s Mr. B Sharp Records label.
Jazz from the Buffalo, NY scene.
| 
Boyd’s Blues, also available at Amazon: CD
And here’s the link again to Dunlop’s artist site.
And here’s the link again to Bannon’s artist site.
| 
| 
| 
Mar 11 2013
Terry Bartolotta Group – “Above the Clouds”
Above the Clouds by the Terry Bartolotta Group recaptures much of the excitement of the bop era of the sixties. It has the vibrancy of the present and the nostalgia of the past. It’s the kind of album that can take a person back.
Your album personnel: Terry Bartolotta (guitar), Nick Sednew (trumpet), Alex Beltran (tenor sax), Nathan Kawaller (bass), and Lucas Gillan (drums).
Bartolotta typically leads out on guitar, as he does on the opening track, but it really deserves mentioning that it’s the bass and drums combo of Kawaller and Gillan that establish this album’s presence. Right from go, they set a brisk pace that stamps its mark upon this music, a mark that’s felt even when the tempo slows down later into ballad territory. But when it comes to tempo on a Hard Bop performance, it’s not just about speed… just as essential is offering up a cheerful attitude, even when the rhythm takes a turn for the serious. Hard Bop has a potent mix of speed and celebration, a joyfulness that often leaves in a cloud of dust. On the first two album tracks, the title-track and then “Through the Square,” that’s what the Kawaller-Gillan duo create.
As I mentioned before, Bartolotta leads out on most tunes. His guitar offers warm notes, bent like rays of refracted sunlight. He shines both as soloist and as an accompanist, and specifically, it’s his transitions between those two roles that elicits some of the best moments of the album. Too often, a musician who switches between lead and support roles offers up their parts as two unrelated approaches. On guitar, Bartolotta makes that transition without finding in necessary to make a wholesale change in wardrobe. There’s a cohesion to the facets of Bartolotta’s expressiveness, and it’s an achievement that allows a musician to create a sound that’s greater than the sum of its individual notes.
The opening two tracks are scorchers. It isn’t until the third track, “Mood Piece,” that brings the first sign of a slower way of life. Music swirls like wisps of smoke in a room with low ceilings, and at times, feels a bit insubstantial. It isn’t until later on, when they take another shot at the ballad form with “Song For Amelia” that the quintet highlights their strengths at a slower gait. There’s a greater confidence here in their expressions of delicacy. Whereas on “Mood Piece,” they gave the impression of fearing they’d shatter the composition if they played with too much force, on “Song For Amelia,” they’re in better form, providing a weightiness to a smokey tune… a heavy impact at slow speeds.
The center of the album assumes a more casual pace than the album bookends. It provides some decent breathing room for Sednew and Beltran to stretch out on trumpet and sax. When playing side-by-side, their individual approaches offer the most rewards in the nuanced differences between the two. But they contribute the strongest parts when the song is a race and they take turns handing the baton off to one another. There is something so damn satisfying about the transition from brass to woodwind and back again when the musicians don’t miss a beat, ripping off notes that finish each others sentences. Thrilling, really.
The album ends with “Aerial View of a City,” what may be the strongest track on the album. There is something intriguingly modern in the way guitar washes across the surface of the music as trumpet and sax play over the top. It’s a very cool form of accompaniment, and it ushers Bartolotta into a more conventional solo. This song also marks a return to the fierce gallop and heat of the opening tracks. Just a great way to finish things off.
Something here for everyone to like, but seeing as I often tend to feature the kind of music that strays out toward Jazz’s fringes, Above the Clouds is definitely one I recommend that the old-school Jazz fans scoop up. These are young Jazz artists who clearly embrace a classic Jazz sound and use their voice to keep it going in the present day.
The album is Self-Produced.
Jazz from the Chicago scene.
Available at Bandcamp, where you can stream four of the album songs, as well as purchase the album in a number of file formats.
Available at eMusic. Available at Amazon: CD
| MP3
Like this:
By davesumner • Jazz Recommendations, Jazz Recommendations - 2012 Releases • 0