Everyone Ought to Get Hip to Larry McKenna

I found out about Larry McKenna several years ago just before our annual trip to the Jersey shore. The local cultural foundation was sponsoring a jazz concert right after our schedule arrival and, even though I didn’t know anything about the leaders, Larry McKenna (tenor) and Tony Miceli (vibes), I bought tickets in advance. When we got there, most of the attendees in front of the venue were dressed in slightly swanky beach attire except for us and four slightly disheveled guys whom my sons immediately and correctly tagged as the band.

All of the members of the quartet were excellent, but I was most impressed by McKenna. Like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Brew Moore, and Allen Eager, he played with the relaxed sense of swing I associate with those Lester Young disciples. To me, his staying in the Philly area instead of heading for New York is the only reason he’s not as well known. His recordings have been for small labels, and I’ve managed to get a couple over time. I’ve been meaning to do a post about him, but the death of his Fellow Philadelphian Bootsie Barnes the other day made me buckle down. For one thing, McKenna and Barnes did an album together a couple of years ago; for another, they’re both in a group disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19, which made things a bit more urgent.

Larry McKenna Plays Harold Arlen: My Shining Hour includes great songs like the title track (a favorite of mine), Let’s Fall in Love, Get Happy, and many other Arlen classics, all played with an incomparable sense of swing and melodic inventiveness. He’s ably backed by Bill Shilling on piano and guitar), Dom Mancini on bass, and Butch Reed on drums. It’s a rare opportunity to hear an exemplar of a kind of jazz that’s seldom practiced my contemporary artists, who often can’t see back past John Coltrane.  Do yourself a favor in these parlous times, and check out Larry McKenna—there are lots of great examples of his playing on YouTube, and his recordings aren’t that hard to find.

Here’s Out of this World, with a very different than the Coltrane version with which I was more familiar.

Discovery: The Nathan Davis Quartet, Live in a Swiss Monastery

In a post I did last year discussing the trumpeter Dusko Goykovich, I said that the saxophonist Nathan Davis was "seriously underrated." Because most of his recordings were made in Europe in the Sixties and Seventies, he never got much acclaim in the U.S. They're either available in vinyl only or in very pricey used CDs. Yesterday, someone posted Jazz Concert in a benedictine  Monastery, a rather obscure LP on the Edici label, on YouTube. I clicked on it and was totally blown away. Davis plays wonderfully on tenor, soprano, and flute, accompanied by the always interesting Mal Waldron on piano, Jimmy Woode on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. I didn't want to waste any time drawing it to your attention, so here it is. Enjoy!

Jazz Latin Jazz: Ray Barretto and New World Spirit

I heard Ray Barretto and New World Spirit quite a few years ago at the Kennedy Center, who at that time included Joe Magnarelli and Myron Walden—not too shabby. On Contact!, The front line is Michael Philip Mossman on trumpet (and trombone on one track) and Adam Kolker on tenor and soprano. I wasn’t familiar with Kolker, and he’s excellent. As form Mossman, I really enjoyed his concert on the Latin side of Jelly Roll Morton at the Kennedy Center a few years ago, including Paquito de Rivera and a flamenco dancer—a fine trumpeter both in and out of Latin jazz.

As the liner notes say, this album is not “Latin jazz,” but rather jazz with Latin overtones. Barretto straddled both worlds, but I suspect he leaned a bit more toward the jazzier end of the spectrum.  More up-tempo tracks like Moss Code, Liberated Spirit, and Sister Sadie are really excellent, and the band is good enough to make me like their version of Michel Legrand’s The Summer Knows—and don't miss their arrangement of Caravan.Strong work from pianist John Di Martino, Jairo Moreno and Hans Glawishnig on bass, Vince Cherico on drums, Ray Vega on percussion, and, of course, Barretto on congas, makes this a go-to  recording in the vein of Conrad Herwig’s Latin takes on Miles, Coltrane, and others.

Here's Caravan and Point of Contact.