On a day when the morning cloud has diluted the morning sun, such that there is a barely homeopathic trace of warmth or heat coming through I sit down in the hope of hearing something to lift the spirits. The Steve Gadd Band Live At Blue Note,Tokyo was recorded towards the end of the olden days on December 18, 2019. Maybe this would be a reminder of happier times.
I don’t really know much about Steve Gadd as a bandleader.
I’ve heard of his extensive session work but I’d always associated him with
yacht rock, soft jazz and those Eric Clapton albums from the period when his
suits (Anthony Price, Versace, Armani) were more interesting than his music. Music that was niiiice but had no edge, that you would admire for the craft,
but not the art. Such is the way of the music snob.
Reading about Gadd, it’s clear that he has played with
everyone except the guy from the chip shop who thinks he’s Elvis and next
door’s cat. The list of albums he has contributed to fills 20 pages of close
typing; in 1975 he was on 24 releases and thirty years later his credits had
reduced to, a still hugely impressive, 21. I wonder if, during all the hours of
packing and unpacking his kit he ever considered a life as a session flautist.
And so to Live At Blue Note. On first listen it comes in like a sheep and goes out like a wolf. Opener, Where’s Earth?, with Walt Fowler’s trumpet to the fore sounds like very late period Miles doing Human Nature or Time After Time. Doesn’t She Know By Now is an equally laid back groove with everyone in the band taking relaxed solos until it all starts to spark at about the four minute mark when they begin to sound like a band playing together not just five blokes in the same room at the same time.
Hidden Drive is more dinner jazz with
some cocktail bar tinkling from Kevin Hays and guitar noodling by David
Spinozza which briefly turns into something more passionate but this is
dissipated when the rest of the band drops out. Contrast that with Rat Race which just sounds like it was
recorded louder and is all-in from the start.
Perhaps the pace doesn’t help either. Most of the tunes are
slow to medium paced shuffles, so the Latin funk of One Point Five stands out as a sign of life, building as it does
into a Gadd solo.
There is a lot of great musicianship on display here, and I
especially like Jimmy Johnson’s rolling bass funk lines, but it lacks
that spark to really start it burning. There are brief flashes when it feels
like it’s going to take off but these are, too frequently, closed off with a
wrap up at the end of the song. Maybe they should have let some of the tunes
extend into jams and allowed more development and more challenge, (I could
definitely have lived with another ten minutes of Way Back Home as it rolled it’s way from Johnson’s bass explorations
into a lively honky-tonk piano with a heavy duty left hand).
Maybe you had to be there.
Available April 2 via usual suspects.
David Sayers
Where’s Earth?; Doesn’t She Know By Now; Timpanogos; Hidden Drive; Walk With Me; One Point Five; Way Back Home; Rat Race; Watching the River Flow.
STOP
PRESS: Steve Gadd is taking part in an hour long Zoom call in
support of the Mark Jon Bolderson Foundation. Mark was a Hexham based drummer and
percussion tutor at Durham University who died in 2017. Further details of the Foundation and the
Steve Gadd Zoom call are HERE
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