Alex Henderson

Jack McDuff
 

“The Best of the Concord Years”
 
        Soul-jazz and hard bop suffered a tremendous loss on January 23, 2001, when Brother Jack McDuff died of heart failure in his adopted home of Minneapolis at the age of 74. Organ lovers all over the world were saddened to learn of his death--McDuff was, after all, one of the Hammond B-3’s all-time heavyweights. At the same time, they could take comfort in knowing that he had lived a long and extremely productive life. The history of jazz is full of tragic figures who died young, but McDuff wasn’t one of them. He was prolific during his youth, and The Best of the Concord Years underscores the fact that Brother Jack maintained his high standards during his old age.
        Spanning 1991-2000, this two-CD, 18-track set takes a look at the final chapter of McDuff’s long career: his years at Concord Jazz. McDuff started recording for Concord in 1991, and he was still signed to the California label at the time of his death. The Best of the Concord Years isn’t the last word on McDuff’s Concord period--he recorded eight albums for Concord as a leader or co-leader, and all of them are well worth obtaining if you’re a serious B-3 enthusiast. This double-CD does, however, offer a thoroughly rewarding overview of his Concord period and demonstrates that the older McDuff of the 1990s was no less exciting than the younger McDuff of the 1950s and 1960s.
        To fully understand why Brother Jack was such an asset to Concord, one should know some things about the events that led up to his Concord years. Born in Champaign, Illinois on September 17, 1926, McDuff was still in his 20s when he started to make a name for himself in the Midwestern jazz scene of the 1950s. As a jazzman, McDuff’s first instrument wasn’t the organ--he started playing jazz on the acoustic bass before teaching himself to play both the piano and the organ in the mid-1950s.         After that, it wasn’t long before the organ became McDuff’s primary instrument, and the man who can take the most credit for his interest in the Hammond B-3 is a seminal Philadelphian named Jimmy Smith. Although Smith wasn’t the first improviser to play jazz on the organ--pianist Fats Waller started playing the pipe organ as a secondary instrument in the 1920s--he pioneered a distinctively funky, blues-drenched, R&B-friendly style of hard bop organ that influenced countless musicians, including McDuff. Smith’s brand of hard bop came to be called soul-jazz because it was so darn soulful, and when McDuff started playing organ for tenor sax honker Willis “Gator” Jackson in the late 1950s, he was well on his way to being recognized as one of Smith’s most captivating disciples.

        McDuff recorded Brother Jack, his first album as a leader, for Prestige Records in 1960, and his many Prestige releases of the 1960s made it clear that he had become a great organist in his own right. Throughout the 1960s, McDuff was the essence of soul-jazz and had no problem appealing to blues and R&B audiences as well as jazz audiences. If a fan of Marvin Gaye, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed or Wilson Pickett was in the mood for instrumental jazz, McDuff was the sort of improviser he/she would turn to.         But by the mid-1970s, the popularity of organ combos had decreased considerably. Feeling he had to change with the times if he wanted to remain competitive, McDuff turned to electric keyboards and moved in a more fusion-oriented direction. However, organ combos regained their popularity in the late 1980s, which is when McDuff dusted off his B-3, signed with Muse Records and triumphantly returned to soul-jazz and hard bop. In 1991 and 1992, the Midwesterner continued in that vein when he recorded his first Concord album, Color Me Blue (CCD-4516)--and that was the beginning of the period that is examined on this two-CD anthology.
        The list of musicians who join McDuff on The Best of the Concord Years reads like a who’s-who of soul-jazz; that includes tenor and alto saxophonist Red Holloway (who he frequently played with in the 1960s), guitarist Pat Martino and pianist Gene Harris as well as organist/trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco and guitarist/singer George Benson (who was a McDuff sideman in the 1960s). Many of the recordings on this two-CD set find McDuff overseeing the cohesive working group that he led in the 1990s--an outfit whose members included alto saxophonist Andrew Beals, tenor saxophonist Jerry Weldon, drummer Rudy Petschauer and the versatile guitarist John Hart. McDuff had nothing but praise for the band; in a 1997 interview, a 70-year-old McDuff enthusiastically told this journalist: “These guys can do it all. John Hart can play outside, or he can play funky. I tell you, this is the best goddamn band in the world. Wherever we go to play, they’re fighting to get in. When I’m playing with these guys, I can’t wait to get to work. And that’s saying a lot, boy.”
        Indeed it is. McDuff didn’t hand out praise lightly--as jovial, humorous and good-natured as he was, McDuff could be a very demanding employer. He expected a lot from his sidemen, and more often than not, he got it.
        On The Best of the Concord Years, McDuff’s sidemen and guests can vary from one track to the next. But whoever McDuff is playing with, the thing that all of these performances have in common is their accessibility. McDuff was not the sort of jazzman who would go of his way to be abstract and ultra-cerebral; he wanted to be accessible, and like the Godfather of Soul James Brown, he loved to make it funky--which is exactly what the organist does on down home, grits-and-gravy offerings like “Blooze in G,” “Pettin’ the Cat” and “Pork Chops & Pasta.” All of these instrumentals are McDuff originals that illustrate his mastery of the 12-bar blues format.
        McDuff firmly believed in the groove factor, which is alive and well on Eddie Harris’ “Cold Duck Time.” Recorded in 1998 for McDuff’s Bringin’ It Home album (CCD-4855), “Cold Duck Time” boasts an inspired McDuff/Benson reunion. These days, Benson is a superstar, but he had yet to become well known when McDuff hired him as a sideman in the early 1960s. After McDuff’s death, Benson asserted, “Jack McDuff set the tone for what I’ve become today,” and that’s no exaggeration--as a guitarist, Benson benefited greatly from the on-the-job training that McDuff gave him when he was starting out.
        Benson wasn’t the only guitarist McDuff used on Bringin’ It Home. He also worked with John Hart and Mark Whitfield, one of the many hard bop-oriented “Young Lions” who emerged in the 1990s. Whitfield is featured on the groove-oriented jazz-blues offering “After Hours,” which gives listeners a rare chance to hear McDuff on acoustic piano--the other keyboard instrument that he learned to play back in the mid-1950s. As a pianist, McDuff inspires comparisons to Gene Harris as well as Ray Bryant and Bobby Timmons; he was as funky on the piano as he was on the organ.
        “J & G Blues” is from Down Home Blues (CCD-4785), a 1996 session that McDuff co-led with the late pianist Gene Harris (who recorded for Concord extensively in the 1980s and 1990s and was 66 when he died in 2000). That track, like most of this double-CD, is an instrumental. McDuff didn’t employ singers very often, although The Best of the Concord Years does contain two rare examples of McDuff using female vocalists. One is Down Home Blues’ title track, which features Gene Harris’ daughter Niki Harris. Although she is primarily an R&B/pop singer and is known for backing pop star Madonna, Niki Harris’ gutsy, robust performance on “Down Home Blues” (a gem that was made famous by the late bluesman Z.Z. Hill) demonstrates that she is quite comfortable in a soul-jazz setting. The collection’s other vocal offering is the Joe Greene standard “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” which offers an earthy performance by singer Denise Perrier. Those who fancy an R&B-ish style of jazz singing à la Ernestine Anderson, Marlena Shaw or Philadelphia singer Denise King should have no problem getting into Perrier’s vocal.
        One of the B-3 virtuosos who McDuff greatly influenced was Joey DeFrancesco, the son of Philly organist Papa John DeFrancesco. Born in 1971, Joey DeFrancesco grew up listening to McDuff--and Concord brought them together on more than one occasion. In 1993, DeFrancesco made a guest appearance on McDuff’s Write On, Capt’n  album (CCD-4568), playing trumpet (his second instrument) on three selections. “Killer Joe,” which finds DeFrancesco providing a muted trumpet solo à la Miles Davis, is from that album. Meanwhile, “Pork Chops & Pasta” (another jazz-blues groove) and a soulful version of the Jerome Kern standard “Yesterdays” are from McDuff and DeFrancesco’s two-organ encounter It’s About Time  (CCD-4705). “Rock Candy” (a tune that McDuff first recorded for Prestige in the early 1960s) is also on It’s About Time, but the live version of “Rock Candy” that appears on The Best of the Concord Years isn’t from that studio album--instead, it’s from the 2001 release Brotherly Love (CCD-4893) and finds the two organists joining forces at the 1996 Concord Jazz Festival.
        Brotherly Love’s primary focus, however, isn’t live material, but rather, McDuff’s final studio session, which took place in March 2000 (only ten months before his death) and boasted Pat Martino on guitar. McDuff’s “Hot Barbecue” (an infectious boogaloo) and the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Georgia on My Mind” are both from that session, and McDuff’s lyrical version of the latter reminds us how appealing a ballad player he could be. Though McDuff loved to swing hard and get funky, “Georgia on My Mind” points to the fact that he also had a romantic side. And in soul-jazz, that went with the territory--smoky ballads, like down-home blues, have always been an important part of the soul-jazz/organ combo experience.
         “From the Pulpit,” one of the highlights of Write On, Capt’n, is jazz-blues with a gospel influence. Growing up in the Midwest, McDuff was no stranger to the musical traditions of the African-American church; both of his parents were devout Protestants, and he grew up hearing the organ in a church setting. Even in the 1940s--before Jimmy Smith’s Hammond B-3 innovations--McDuff loved the sound of the organ and was well aware of what Fats Waller, Count Basie and others had done with it in jazz’ pre-bebop era. But his parents didn’t believe that the organ belonged in secular music--in their minds, it was strictly a gospel instrument. And that explains why McDuff’s first professional jazz gigs were on the upright bass. “When I was about 20,” McDuff told this journalist in 1997, “I had an organ. But my folks were religious, and they wouldn’t let me use it to play boogie woogie.”
        One of the collection’s more unlikely offerings is an interpretation of Lalo Schifrin’s mysterious theme from the television spy thriller “Mission: Impossible,” which was recorded in 1996 and released on McDuff’s That’s the Way I Feel About It (CCD-4760) album the following year. Schifrin’s melody is hardly the first thing one would expect a jazz improviser to record, but in fact, the “Mission: Impossible” theme lends itself nicely to a jazz makeover. Besides, Schifrin is no stranger to jazz--before he made a fortune composing for films and television programs, the Argentinean immigrant was trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s pianist and musical director.
        McDuff’s version of the “Mission: Impossible” theme is a perfect example of his willingness to embrace popular culture. While some jazz musicians have an elitist disdain for pop culture, McDuff was never an elitist--a tough bandleader with high standards, certainly, but not an elitist or a musical snob. He realized that during the Swing Era of the 1930s and early to mid-1940s, jazz was very much a part of popular culture--and he refused to believe that post-swing jazz could only appeal to intellectuals in Sweden (although he commanded a loyal following in the Scandinavian countries and other parts of Europe). Arguably, the soul-jazz that McDuff and other organists provided picked up where Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford and Lionel Hampton left off--it was to hard bop what those blues-drenched musicians were to swing.
        Sadly, McDuff isn’t the only B-3 master the jazz world has lost in recent years--Richard “Groove” Holmes, Shirley Scott, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Big John Patton and Charles Earland are among the other Jimmy Smith-influenced organists who died in the 1990s or early 2000s. But we can be thankful that those B-3 greats, like McDuff, were documented extensively when they were alive. We can also be thankful that McDuff had such a strong work ethic. George Benson knew what he was talking about when he asserted: “Jack was one of the toughest bandleaders there ever was. He insisted on a certain caliber of musicianship; he wanted excellence in his players.” And The Best of the Concord Years demonstrates that McDuff never lost his desire to excel.
 
—ALEX HENDERSON
November 2002
 
        Not to be confused with Poncho Sanchez’ trombonist, Alex  Henderson is a veteran music critic whose work has appeared in Billboard, Spin, JazzTimes, Jazziz, Pulse!, the L.A. Weekly, CD Review, HITS, All About Jazz and numerous other publications. Since 1996, he has written several thousand reviews for the All Music Guide’s website and series of reference books.  
 

Brian Trainor

“Tranquillo”
 
        Camaraderie. Rapport. Communication. Interplay. Chemistry. These are things that have characterized many memorable jazz groups over the years--groups like John Coltrane’s early 1960s quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, or Miles Davis’ cohesive mid-1950s quintet with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Those groups thrived on spontaneity and individual expression, but they were also examples of teamwork--and that sort of teamwork is what acoustic pianist Brian Trainor and colleagues Steve Marcus (tenor and soprano saxophone), Tyrone Brown (acoustic bass) and Jimmy Miller (drums) strive for on Tranquillo.
        It is no coincidence that Tranquillo is listed as a release by the Brian Trainor Quartet instead of simply by Brian Trainor; the New Jersey-born pianist is quick to point out that Tranquillo is truly a group effort--and that spirit of teamwork is very much in evidence whether the quartet is embracing Trainor’s own compositions or interpreting familiar standards.
        “Steve Marcus, Tyrone Brown and Jimmy Miller are not secondary on this album,” the 54-year-old Trainor stresses. “They are an integral part of what I’m doing. When you see this quartet live, you see four guys having a wonderful time--four guys who really know one another musically. Every time I work with this group, it’s a thrill.”
        When the Brian Trainor Quartet was officially formed in 1996, all of its members brought a wealth of experience to the table. Born in Trenton, NJ on August 29, 1950, Trainor was only a teenager when he studied with alto sax legend Phil Woods--and by the end of the 1960s, he was being employed with heavyweights like tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Trainor had been performing live a long time when he began to build a catalog in the early 1990s; Tranquillo is his sixth album as a leader and his first for the British Harkit label.
Marcus is a versatile, far-reaching saxman whose credits range from a lucrative association with flutist Herbie Mann during fusion’s early years to a 12-year stint with the notoriously demanding Buddy Rich. Brown has been employed by everyone from Max Roach, Grover Washington, Jr. and Pat Martino to Lou Rawls, and Miller is a veteran of the Philadelphia/South Jersey jazz scene who has played with Anita O'Day, Richie Cole and Dave Liebman.
        “Steve, Tyrone, Jimmy and I are very emotional players,” Trainor asserts. “When we’re playing, we try our best to make somebody feel something.” And that warm, emotional outlook is evident throughout this album. It is evident on the placid, good-natured opener “Mercer Balloon” (a Trainor original) and a dusky yet hard-swinging performance of John Coltrane’s “Equinox”; it is evident on Trainor’s reflective “In Stillness” and an introspective version of the A.J. Lerner/Frederick Loewe standard “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
        “Mercer Balloon” and the thoughtful “Pearl Pale Hands” are both pieces that Trainor composed for his Tangled Roots Suite, which contains a total of 22 songs. The songs were written in such a way that they can either be played together or stand on their own separately; ten of them appeared on Trainor’s fourth album, Tangled Roots (which was released on Summit Records in 2003), while “Mercer Balloon” and “Pearl Pale Hands” are making their recorded debut on Tranquillo.
        Trainor has long been of the opinion that if a musician is going to embrace a standard that has been recorded many times, it is important to bring something personal to the song--which is exactly what Trainor’s quartet does on Johnny Mandel’s “Emily” and Horace Silver’s “Tokyo Blues.” Quite often, “Emily” has been performed as a gentle ballad; Trainor’s quartet, however, performs the Mandel standard at a fast waltz tempo. Trainor notes: “Sometimes, my quartet plays ‘Emily’ quietly on stage, but for this record, we wanted something a little more aggressive.”
        And on “Tokyo Blues,” Trainor surprises us by opening a Silver classic on an avant-garde note with some Cecil Taylor-influenced pianism--that is, before moving into a gritty, funky hard bop/soul-jazz groove. Trainor isn’t an avant-garde artist in the strict sense; he is essentially a post-bop/hard bop improviser whose sense of swing has been influenced by pianists ranging from Bill Evans, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk to Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock. But Trainor respects and appreciates jazz’ avant-garde, and his unexpected introduction to “Tokyo Blues” is his way of acknowledging Taylor’s often misunderstood genius.
        The album’s biggest surprise of all, however, is the Title track “Tranquillo,” a spoken word offering that finds Trainor functioning as a vocalist and underscores his love of poetry.         “I’ve been writing poetry my whole life,” Trainor explains. “’Tranquillo’ is another color, another part of whom I am. On most of my previous records, I have included at least one vocal.”
        One thing that Tranquillo will not be accused of is favoring technique over feeling; Trainor, Marcus, Brown and Miller are all smart enough to realize that in jazz, virtuosity doesn’t mean a lot without soulfuless and the down-home feeling of the blues--qualities that are in abundance on Tranquillo. “When I was studying with Phil Woods as a teenager,” Trainor recalls, “we went through all of the technical aspects of jazz, and he said, ‘You got all that? Well, forget it. Forget all that technical stuff and play from the heart.’ And Phil’s statement has stayed with me all these years. The players in this quartet all have strong chops, but this record isn’t about showing off our chops--it’s about feeling. Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk weren’t just about technique--they were about feeling and emotion, and that is what my quartet brings to Tranquillo.”
 
—Alex Henderson, September 2004
 
Alex Henderson is a veteran music critic whose work has appeared in Billboard, Spin, JazzTimes, Jazziz, the L.A. Weekly, CD Review, HITS, All About Jazz and numerous other publications. Since 1996, he has written several thousand reviews for the All Music Guide’s popular website and series of reference books.

Thiago de Mello

"Another Feeling"
 
         JSR Records President Arnaldo DeSouteiro, who is among Brazil’s most accomplished jazz and pop producers, exalts Thiago de Mello and Dexter Payne’s Another Feeling as “one of the best, most sophisticated and musically rewarding productions I ever made”—and considering the caliber of musicians DeSouteiro has worked with, that is high praise indeed. Over the years, the 42-year-old DeSouteiro has worked with a who’s-who of Brazilian music, including Antonio Carlos Jobim (widely regarded as “the George Gershwin of Brazil”), João Gilberto, Dom Um Romão, Eumir Deodato, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Claudio Roditi, Mario Castro-Neves and Luis Bonfá. In fact, DeSouteiro describes the late Bonfá as this album’s "spiritual godfather"; it was the legendary Bonfá who introduced DeSouteiro to veteran percussionist/composer/guitarist/pianist de Mello back in the 1980s.
        “I became very impressed by all of Thiago's qualities as a writer, arranger, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist,” recalls the Rio de Janeiro-based DeSouteiro, who first worked with de Mello when the master musician played percussion on Bonfá’s The Bonfá Magic (which DeSouteiro produced) in 1991. De Mello and DeSouteiro went on to work together extensively, and Another Feeling is their most recent collaboration. DeSouteiro has seen de Mello perform in a variety of settings—sometimes with his large Amazon ensemble, sometimes with smaller groups—but for Another Feeling, he envisioned something de Mello had never done before: a Brazilian jazz album excluding both bass and regular drums. On this intimate, accessible, highly melodic effort, the basic format consists of Brazilian percussion, clarinet or alto saxophone (which are provided by the swinging yet delightfully lyrical Payne) and acoustic piano. Another Feeling is mostly instrumental, although singer Ithamara Koorax—DeSouteiro’s wife since 1990 and a major vocal star in Brazil—is featured on four selections: “An Evening Prayer,” “The Exile Song,” the title track and an interesting, unlikely medley that combines de Mello’s Amazon-minded “Urumutum” with the traditional African-American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (which de Mello was first exposed to when he heard Louis Armstrong singing the song on his album Louis Armstrong and the Bible).
        “The idea was for this album to be different from everything else Arnaldo had done,” explains the 72-year-old de Mello, who grew up in the Amazon region of Brazil but has lived in New York City for almost 40 years. “The idea was to avoid the traditional setup of piano, bass and drums combined with a horn. To go from my band Amazon--which has 12 people—to just having a trio with clarinet or saxophone, piano and my organic percussion was a very different experience.”
        The traditional Brazilian percussion instruments that de Mello plays on Another Feeling (which is dominated by his own compositions) are not instruments he purchased in a music store—they are instruments he constructed himself in his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. De Mello notes: “I generally make my own percussions from wood, bamboo, clay and seeds. That's why I call it organic percussion--I get everything from nature.”
        When de Mello enthusiastically approved DeSouteiro’s idea for a Brazilian jazz album without bass or regular drums, there was no question who the clarinetist would be. De Mello and DeSouteiro agreed that the ideal man for the job was Payne, who previously recorded with de Mello on their Inspiration session of 2003 and enjoys an equally strong rapport with him throughout Another Feeling. De Mello suggested that instead of using only one pianist, they would employ different pianists at different times—and the project’s acoustic pianists range from two Americans (Richard Kimball and Cliff Korman) to two Brazilians (Haroldo Mauro, Jr. and Helio Alves). The fifth pianist is de Mello, whose piano playing is heard on the “Urumutum/Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” medley. De Mello also plays a little guitar on this album, although his primary role is that of a percussionist.            Similarly, the 54-year-old Payne is primarily a clarinetist on Another Feeling—the clarinet is his main instrument—although he is equally expressive when he switches to the alto sax on “An Evening Prayer,” the funky “What About That?” and the title track. Clarinet or alto, Payne’s warmth as a musician always comes through on this CD.
        Another Feeling gets off to a very congenial, good-natured start with “Rede de Caboclo,” which means “Indian Hammock” in Portuguese. Like the guajiros of Cuba, the jibaros of Puerto Rico and the campesinos, rancheros and vaqueros of Mexico, de Mello had a very rural upbringing—so rural, in fact, that he only slept in a hammock during his pre-adult years in the Brazilian Amazon. “Rede de Caboclo” was inspired by that part of de Mello’s life.
        “I never slept in a bed until I went to Rio de Janeiro to study when I was 18,” recalls the trilingual de Mello, who speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English fluently. “For my first three weeks in Rio, I had a hard time getting used to sleeping in a bed because I was used to sleeping in a hammock.”
        De Mello wrote “A Hug for Gil” in remembrance of the famous arranger/bandleader Gil Evans, with whom he became friends with in the late 1970s. “A Hug for Gil” celebrates Evans’ interest in Brazilian music in two different ways—first with a very raw, earthy introduction, then with an inviting samba groove. De Mello remembers: “Gil was very fond of Brazilian music—mostly bossa nova, but also, the more primitive sounds. So on ‘A Hug for Gil,’ I have both of these elements.”
        It is no coincidence that “An Evening Prayer” has a gospel-ish soul-jazz flavor; the song was inspired by de Mello’s experiences growing up in a Baptist church. Like the rest of Latin America, Brazil is a predominantly Catholic country—Protestants are as much of a minority in Latin America as they are in Spain, Italy and Portugal. But de Mello explains that members of his family were converted to the Baptist sect when, in the 1890s, American missionaries from Mississippi went to the Amazon.
        “When I was a young kid, my mother would sing all these Anglo Saxon church hymns,” de Mello recalls. “Every Sunday, I would go to church and hear all these hymns that had been translated into Portuguese but were written by Anglo Saxon composers in the 1700s and 1800s. Outside of the church, I heard Amazonian chants—and when I heard those Anglo Saxon hymns, it was interesting because their sense of harmony was so different from the folklore of the Amazon.”
        The soul-jazz and gospel influence is equally appealing on the title track and on de Mello’s “Urumutum”/“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” medley. While Koorax (who de Mello calls The Divine Diva) sings in Portuguese exclusively on “An Evening Prayer,” “The Exile Song” and Another Feeling’s title track, the medley finds the Rio de Janeiro resident performing in both Portuguese and English (a language that—like de Mello and DeSouteiro—she speaks fluently). Payne comments: “As a vocalist, Ithamara has both a sweetness and a commanding presence. I love the way she made ‘Urumutum’ and ‘Swing Low’ fit together.”
        “Another Feeling” is a song that de Mello wrote long before he met DeSouteiro, Koorax or Payne; he wrote the song in 1967 after learning that Argentinean doctor turned revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been killed in Bolivia. De Mello points out that this album’s title track was inspired by Guevara’s activities as a young medical student in the early 1950s--the pre-Fidel Castro part of Guevara’s life that was depicted in Walter Salles’ 2003 film “The Motorcycle Diaries” (which is known by its Spanish-language title, “Los Diarios de Motocicleta,” in Spain and Latin America).
        “When Che Guevara was a young medical student,” de Mello explains, “he rode his motorcycle all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Amazon—where he treated the sick people in a leper hospital near the border of Brazil and Peru. Che Guevara was the only medical student who would go to that leper hospital. The lyrics of ‘Another Feeling’ are more than political; they are about a human being who decided to help people that others wouldn’t help.”
        De Mello has a long history of political and social activism. He has been quite active in human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and UNICEF--and de Mello was the founder of VENTANA, which he describes as “an organization of writers, poets, journalists, painters, dancers and musicians helping the artists of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala during the Contra war.” One of the people who has inspired de Mello’s activism over the years is his older brother Amadeu, a well known poet who is now close to 80.
        The poignant “The Exile Song” was inspired by the challenges that Amadeu faced during his many years in exile. In 1964, Amadeu fled Brazil to escape the military dictatorship that the country had at the time; he took refuge in Chile but ended up fleeing Chile as well when the socialist government of the late Salvador Allende was overthrown by the infamous military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. After an extended stay in Europe, Amadeu was eventually able to safely return to Brazil.
        “There were many military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s--Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, the government in Argentina,” de Mello notes. “My brother’s books were banned in Brazil all those years. So I wrote ‘The Exile Song’ for my brother, who I love very much. For many years, he could not function as a poet or a writer in his own country because his rights were taken away. However, some of Amadeu’s best-known poems and books were written while in exile.”
        De Mello wrote the samba-minded “Tal Como o Vinho” for another Brazilian: DeSouteiro. The veteran musician explains: “Arnaldo is one of the most loyal friends I’ve ever had even though we are from different generations and different parts of Brazil; he was born in the south of Brazil, and I was born in the Amazon. ‘Tal Como o Vinho’ means ‘Like the Wine,’ and I called this song ‘Like the Wine’ because a friendship is like wine—as you get older, it gets better. That’s the spirit of the song.”
        A visit to East Hampton, Long Island (in the suburbs of New York City) resulted in two of the pieces heard on Another Feeling: the reflective “The Lonely Piano” and the free-spirited “Mar Aberto,” which de Mello wrote after walking along the beach. “The Lonely Piano” was written in the East Hampton mansion of his friend Merle Hoffman, who was trained as a classical pianist but quit playing. However, she kept her piano, and the title “The Lonely Piano” stems from the fact that she was no longer playing it. “I called her piano the lonely piano because it was just sitting there by itself,” de Mello says. “By writing ‘The Lonely Piano,’ my desire was perhaps to give my friend Merle the desire to go back to her piano so that it would no longer be a lonely piano.”
        Other highlights of Another Feeling include “Kimbolian Dawn” (a piece that was written for pianist Richard Kimball—who he has known since 1967—and combines Brazilian jazz with hints of Thelonious Monk) and “Too Good Notes,” which de Mello describes as “sort of an answer to Jobim’s ‘One Note Samba.’” The percussionist originally planned to call the latter “Two Note Samba,” but when DeSouteiro informed him that their idol Luis Bonfá had already written a song with that title, de Mello decided to rename the song. De Mello considering renaming the piece “Two Good Notes” but went with “Too Good Notes” instead.
        De Mello says of “Kimbolian Dawn”: “When I met Richard Kimball 38 years ago, he was playing not the piano, but an enormous acoustic bass—and I was on guitar. So when I asked Richard—who is now a respected pianist/composer—to record ‘Kimbolian Dawn,’ I overdubbed my ‘vocal bass’ on that track, trying to give a hint of our past and remembering when we met back in 1967.”
        The only songs on this album that weren’t totally written by de Mello are “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and the optimistic “No Wolf at the Door,” which Payne co-wrote. Payne says of the latter: “If we look at the world in a positive light, there is no wolf at the door. Some of the happiest music comes from the impoverished hills around Rio de Janeiro, where the poorest of the poor live. There is a cultural and spiritual wealth there that people in the United States who scuffle for money all the time don’t have.”
        Born in the Amazon on August 20, 1933, de Mello got his first taste of urban life when, in 1951, he moved to Rio de Janeiro at the age of 18. Musically, the ‘50s and ‘60s were a great time to be in Brazil; that era gave us the bossa nova explosion and saw the rise of Brazilian icons like Jobim, Bonfá, Vinicius de Moraes and João & Astrud Gilberto. But politically, Brazil was a very troubled country in the 1960s—and in 1966, de Mello moved to New York City to escape Brazil’s political turmoil. De Mello kept busy playing bossa nova guitar in Manhattan clubs in the late 1960s, and in 1973, he recorded his debut album, Amazon (which DeSouteiro has reissued on CD on his JSR label). Over the years, de Mello has played with a long list of Brazilian heavyweights—including Laurindo Almeida, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Claudio Roditi and Airto Moreira—and he is also known for recording with famous non-Brazilian artists ranging from guitarist Sharon Isbin and saxophonist Paul Winter to the late jazz/cabaret singer Susannah McCorkle. De Mello first met Payne in 1997, when both of them were visiting the Amazon for a Brazilian music festival; they hit it off immediately and have stayed in touch ever since.
        “Thiago and I met in a boat in the middle of the Amazon River in the heart of Amazonia,” Payne recalls. “The musical friendship and resonance we found there far overshadowed both my gig and the festival. It was actually that year, in Manaus, that we recorded our Inspiration album with guitarist Antonio Mello.”
        The year in which de Mello moved from the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro is also the year in which Payne was born; Payne, who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, was born in Upstate New York on July 5, 1951. Although a generation younger than de Mello, Payne also boasts an impressive resume. For 16 years, he played with the late blues/folk singer Judy Roderick—and over the years, Payne has also been employed by artists ranging from bluesman Barbecue Bob to African artist Boubacar Diebate (who is from Senegal). Stylistically, Payne is not easy to pin down. Although he has strong jazz chops—a fact that is evident throughout Another Feeling—Payne doesn’t consider himself strictly a jazz musician and is quick to point out that he has no problem playing blues, folk, R&B, Latin music or African pop.
        “It’s hard for me to sit still musically,” asserts Payne, who grew up in the United States but lived in Latin America for over two years and speaks Spanish as well as some Portuguese. “I like so many different kinds of music.”
        The engineer on Another Feeling is Robert Auld, who spent 15 years playing trumpet in de Mello’s band Amazon. Payne observes: “Because Bob played with Thiago all those years, he knows a lot about his compositions. Bob has a great ear and a great dedication to Thiago’s music. What he did for us on Another Feeling went beyond engineering. He really put his heart and soul into the project.”   
        In the 2000s, de Mello has received high marks from Downbeat Magazine readers on more than one occasion; he was voted the #8 percussionist in the annual Downbeat Readers’ Poll in 2000, #3 in that poll in 2004 and #4 in 2005. It was also in 2004 that Payne was voted the #8 clarinetist in that Downbeat poll. Meanwhile, Downbeat readers have been quite favorable to Koorax in the poll’s female singer category; she was voted #10 female singer in 2000, #4 in 2002, #11 in 2004 and #8 in 2005. And Downbeat readers voted JSR one of the top 10 jazz labels for five consecutive years from 2001-2005.
        With its combination of Brazilian and American participants, Another Feeling exemplifies what Payne describes as “cross-cultural collaboration.” The union of Brazilian and American musicians has yielded excellent results in the past, ranging from guitarist Laurindo Almeida and alto saxophonist Bud Shank’s groundbreaking Brazilliance sessions of 1953 and 1958 to Stan Getz’ bossa nova encounters with Jobim, Bonfá and the Gilbertos in the early 1960s—and Another Feeling demonstrates that positive things can continue to happen when Brazilian and American players join forces.
        “I have felt the pull of Brazilian music for many years,” Payne asserts.  “Brazilian music first attracted me in 1971. Following that intuition—that thread—brought me to discover a great friend and mentor in the person of Thiago de Mello.                 Thiago is the type of composer who can make a musical statement that is very familiar and very fresh at the same time. I believe that Thiago and I have achieved a very positive balance between surprise and familiarity on Another Feeling, which is about composition as well as improvisation. There is a very warm, familiar feeling to Thiago's music, and yet, he always has a corner to turn. There is always a little twist, a little surprise coming up.”
        De Mello adds: “With music, there are no limits. A melody should reach your heart and your soul—and that’s my goal. My whole thing is the human experience. For me, family and friendship are very important elements in my life and elements of my music.”
 
—Alex Henderson, November 2005
 
        Alex Henderson is a Philadelphia-based journalist whose work has appeared in Billboard, Spin, JazzTimes, Jazziz, the L.A. Weekly, CD Review, HITS, Black Radio Exclusive (BRE), All About Jazz and numerous other well known publications over the years. Since 1996, he has written thousands of reviews for the All Music Guide’s popular website and series of reference books.

Concord Jazz, 2002 (Jack McDuff)

Harkit Records, 2004 (Brian Trainor)

Jazz Station Records, 2005 (Thiago de Mello)