jazzmatazz | upcoming | recent | reviews | books | links | musicians | labels | sale list | stores | sweetnighter
previous review | reviews home | next review
Albert Nicholas with Art Hodes’ All-Stars
Albert’s Back In Town
(Delmark)
Jazz, especially after the bebop revolution, maintained a cadre that held the line for New Orleans-styled improvisation—the syncopated, cake-walk, banjo/tuba/no bass/no saxophone almost march-cadenced music that dirgefully walked to the funeral and gloriously strutted back, celebrating life with trumpet and clarinet dancing atop the rest.
Chicago, site of the first northern migration and home to Armstrong and Oliver in the twenties, kept that New Orleans connection alive well into the fifties. And a premier exponent of "traditional" jazz was pianist Art Hodes. So when clarinet legend Albert Nicholas, a one-time King Oliver sideman, visited the windy city in 1959, Hodes grabbed him for an all-star confab.
Nicholas had a beautiful tone and a sophisticated improvisatory skill, one that danced across the rhythm with a sly grace, that performed eloquently when backed just by Hodes’ simple piano lines, and that embellished the group improvisations without hogging the limelight. Stylistically, the group performed in traditional early jazz ensemble style, and also in a more modern mode, as on "Lulu’s Back In Town," with individual soloists taking the lead accompanied just by the piano. They shimmy, they march, they laugh and sparkle; they play a sleepy, down-home "Creole Love Call"; and in Nicholas they link back to the earliest years of jazz and exceptional solo mastery.
— Jules Epstein, March 2001
please send comments to jazzmatazz@att.net
last update 15 March 2001