Jeremy Sassoon (vocals, piano); Harry Greene (guitar, saxophone); Chris Rabbit (bass); Pat Illingworth (drums)
There are nights at Dean Street where the room settles before the music
even has a chance to. Low light, that gentle clink of glasses, conversations
tapering off not because they’re told to, but because something in the air says
it’s time.
This was one of those nights.
Jeremy Sassoon walked on and, almost
immediately, it stopped feeling like an album launch. No grand statement, no
sense of occasion being forced. Just a man, a piano, and a band in a room that
seemed ready to listen. He joked that the previous night had been the rehearsal
and this was the real one, but what unfolded didn’t feel rehearsed at all. It
felt lived in.
That’s where Sassoon sits best.
Not performance in the showy sense…
something quieter than that. A conversation. A sharing of stories that don’t
belong to him on paper, but somehow sound like they do by the time he’s
finished with them.
Older and Wiser is built on that idea. Nine songs,
none of them his own, yet all connected by something deeper than authorship.
Each one a life stage. A moment. A question we’ve all either asked or avoided
asking.
He opens with Frenchman Street
Blues, and straight away you’re not in Soho anymore. You’re somewhere
warmer, looser — specifically Frenchman Street in New Orleans tucked just
beyond the tourist pull of Bourbon Street, where the real heartbeat of the city
lives. Small bars, music spilling out onto the street, that sense that anything
can happen if you stay long enough. Even a song written for a funeral carries a
strange sense of light there. Not grief, not really. More an acceptance. A
celebration, even. It sets the tone without announcing it.
Then Stop This Train quietly
shifts things inward. Time, ageing, that creeping realisation that everything
keeps moving whether you’re ready to or not. There’s no drama in how he
delivers it, no attempt to heighten the emotion. He just lets it sit there, and
in doing so, it lands harder. You could feel the room recognise it — and
underneath it all, that lovely brushed snare just whispering away, sketching
out the gentle, insistent rhythm of a train running beneath the song, carrying
everything forward whether you’re ready or not.
That’s the thing with Sassoon. He
doesn’t push meaning at you. He trusts the song to do the work.And when it
really lands, it lands properly.
The Things We’ve Handed Down was that moment. You could feel it
happen. Conversations stopped. Glasses paused mid-air. That familiar hum of a
busy room just… disappeared. A song about a child not yet born, about
inheritance, about what we pass on without even knowing we have it to give. It
could easily tip into sentimentality. It doesn’t. It just sits there, honest
and exposed.
The silence afterwards said more than
the applause.
He talks a lot through the set, but
never too much. Just enough to open the door into each song. Stories about New
Orleans, about hearing a track in a shopping centre and needing to know what it
was, about a chance moment leading to Desert Island Discs. None
of it feels rehearsed, It all feeds into the same idea — these songs matter
because of the lives inside them.
And that’s why something like At
Seventeen works. It shouldn’t, on paper. A male voice carrying a
deeply personal female narrative. But he doesn’t try to reshape it or stamp
himself over it. He just tells it. Carefully. Respectfully. And in doing that,
it finds a different kind of truth.
The band get it. They have to.
Chris Rabbitt on bass, Pat Illingworth
on drums, Harry Greene on guitar — there’s a looseness there, but it’s not
casual. It’s the kind of playing that knows when to step in and when to leave
space alone. Harry Greene in particular on guitar and saxophone, nothing
overplayed, nothing wasted. Just colour where it’s needed.
There are moments where the set lifts,
of course. A reharmonised Let It Be that feels warmer, more
gospel than you expect. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight sitting
perfectly in that late-night space. And then Don’t Let Me Be
Misunderstood, which comes with a story that could easily overshadow the
song itself — licensing battles, months of back and forth, even Mike Oldfield
himself giving approval for 22 seconds of Tubular Bells, which
Sassoon has woven into the heart of this song — a hit for The Animals and Nina
Simone — but when that piano section builds, when it starts to move somewhere
unexpected, you understand why he held onto it. It earns its place.
By the time you reach the closing
stretch, the shape of the album becomes clearer.
This isn’t just a collection of songs.
It’s a line drawn through a life.
And it ends exactly where it should.
Old and Wise doesn’t try to be anything other
than what it is. A reflection. A letting go. Sassoon frames it through his past
in medicine, through conversations about how we leave, what we say, what we
don’t. It could be heavy. It isn’t. It’s calm. Almost peaceful. The kind of
ending that doesn’t demand attention but stays with you anyway.
I only write about music I connect with.
And in a genre as wide as jazz, that’s not always easy.
This connects.
Not because it tries to impress. Not
because it pushes boundaries or demands to be heard. But because it understands
something simple and often overlooked.
This album is a must for every
collection, it asks questions and then answers them!
There’s often this quiet pressure around
artists… that sense they need to justify themselves by writing their own
material. As if authorship is the only real marker of authenticity.
But listening to Sassoon, you start to
question that.
Because when you have this kind of feel
for a song — when you can step inside someone else’s words and make them sound
like they’ve been waiting for your voice all along — why would you need to
write your own just to prove a point?
That’s the shift here.
By choosing these songs, by placing them
in this order, by letting each one breathe exactly when it needs to, Sassoon
doesn’t just perform them… he reshapes them. Gently, without fuss, but with
absolute intent.
The narrative changes.
Songs you thought you knew start to feel
different. Not reworked for the sake of it, not dressed up to impress — just…
seen from another angle. Lived in a little longer.
And somehow, through that, they feel new
again.
Not because they’ve been changed.
But because they’ve been understood.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you
can do with a song… is just tell it properly. Glenn Wright
See also ALBUM REVIEW
No comments :
Post a Comment