Search - Roswell Rudd Quartet :: Keep Your Heart Right

For five decades, trombonist Roswell Rudd has navigated through many inventions and dimensions of music, from Thelonious Monk, the avant-garde stylings of the New York Art Quartet, to Charlie Haden s Liberation Music Orchestra, West African, Mongolian, and Latin music. Now, on Keep Your Heart Right, his fourth Sunnyside release, Rudd returns from his musical world tour with a recording that revives his early compositions in a lyric-centric, straight-ahead setting that recalls his roots.

This horn player is definitely a frustrated singer whose playing has in turn been influenced more by singers than by other instrumentalists, such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Al Hibbler, Rudd writes in the CD liner notes. The songs came of necessity out of experiences, people, things that I read or heard, and the songs were piling up always a part of my musicality.

Rudd bathes his songs in a church-meets-bop aura with an impressive drumless quartet featuring pianist Lafayette Harris, vocalist Sunny Kim and bassist Bradley Jones. With Jones s firm basslines, Harris s effervescent keyboard lines, and Kim s diasporic and down-home vocals, Rudd s rooted and revolutionary trombone revisits some of his compositions. The title track is a reverent gospelized number composed in 1965 with Archie Shepp, revised with vocal version sung by Sheila Jordan, included in an opera The Gold Rush, and re-recorded in 2000. Loved by Love is a beautiful, hymn-like composition inspired by the words of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I Look in the Mirror is a no-nonsense 4/4 swinger with a delicious bass solo.

The Light Is With Me is another selection that beams in the delicate, Ducal spotlight, contrasted by the bouncy, boppish I m Going Sane (One Day at a Time). Rudd and company revisit Bamako, with English lyrics, previously recorded on the CDs El Espíritu Jíbaro with cuatro master Yomo Toro, MALIcool, The Shepp/Rudd Quintet Live In New York with Archie Shepp, and Early & Late Steve Lacy. All Nite Soul is yet another track set in a Godly groove, dedicated to the late Reverend John Garcia Gensel of St. Peter s Church in New York City, and the All Nite Soul celebrations he started in the sixties. The hypnotic Suh Blah Blah Buh Subi is another New York-centric number that recalls Rudd s days as a cab driver. The stop time syncopated You Blew It originally included in Rudd s jazz oratorio Blues For the Planet Earth is a blues/vocalese cousin to Marvin Gaye s Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology). Whatever Turns You On Baby is a sexy chaser that closes this vibrant CD.