Let's face it, an album that is sub-titled Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't quite grab you in quite the same way as, say, an album called Lady in Satin, A Kind of Blue, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning or Songs For the Late Hours, does.
Admittedly, cholera, like measles and gastro-enteritis may no longer, in the current climate, be headlines in The Lancet but, nonetheless, such a title isn't going to inspire you to run down to your friendly neighbourhood record store (Central Arcade, Newcastle) and say to the assistant "Have you got Cholera?"
The main title, Candlelight, is more descriptive and, along with Candlelight, has four other numbers composed by Bix revealing just how harmonically advanced he was in comparision with his contemporaries. I've often wondered if Duke drew from Bix's piano compositions - both have been separately linked to Debussy - worthy of further investigation.
Here the music, whilst in many ways compelling, is never totally jazz. Kurtzman's tone on violin is full and luscious almost viola-like in its sonority - evidence of her symphonic background. However, although it doesn't have the swing, the lilt of Grappelli or, closer to home, Emma Fisk, it's still a good sound.
Malinverni provides the jazz content and it's a collaboration of opposites that succeeds. He also supplies a couple of his own compositions.
A reworking of Coleman Hawkins' reworking of Body and Soul works well - that sentence involved a lot of work - and it is a worthy tribute to the original. Scott Joplin's Solace has a delightful turn of the century tearoom feel to it but it's the Bixian numbers that clinch it for me.
Lance
Pulcinella; Candlelight; Oblivion; Davenport Blues; Por Una Cabeza; In the Dark; Solace; Body and Soul; Doce de Coco; In a Mist; Love in the Time of Cholera; Flashes.
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