I’m All For You (Blue Note)
Joe Lovano
Released May 4, 2004
New York Times Best Jazz Albums of 2004
YouTube:
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About:
You have to create the song as if you wrote it. That’s what jazz and improvising are really about. That’s Lester Young’s approach and Bird’s, Coleman Hawkins’, Ben Webster’s and also Sarah Vaughan’s and Frank Sinatra’s approach. And that’s my approach as well.
As always, my intent is to be creative, to sustain the mood but to also be rhythmically diverse and free within the music because all tempos are in there. What it means to play a ballad is not to just be playing it slow. It’s feeling all the possibilities in the rhythms, allowing the music to flow.
I chose to record Early Autumn it as a dedication to Woody and Stan and to my early development in this music. It’s a song my dad taught me to introduce me to different ways of playing through different keys. For years, I avoided playing and recording it until this chance to play it with Hank. The time was ripe. We harmonized a bit differently in the turnaround sections and made it more personal. It’s such a strong melody! Every version of it I’ve ever heard plays only on the theme, so my approach was to play more of the theme at the end.
My career as a soloist has been one of the developing conceptions in my playing to fit into varied contexts so I’m free to react within different kinds of moods and energies of different musicians. Basically I’m a soloist so the foundation of my playing comes from playing ballads and to be expressive within any kind of music I play. This is another plateau that is a wide step that I can stand on.
Track Listing:
1. I’m All for You (Joe Lovano) 07:50
2. Don’t Blame Me (Dorothy Fields / Jimmy McHugh) 07:51
3. Monk’s Mood (Thelonious Monk) 04:01
4. The Summary (A Suite for Pops) (Thad Jones) 05:16
5. Stella by Starlight (Ned Washington / C. Young) 05:47
6. I Waited for You (Walter Fuller / Dizzy Gillespie) 09:28
7. Like Someone in Love (Johnny Burke / James Van Heusen) 06:50
8. Early Autumn (Ralph Burns / Woody Herman / Johnny Mercer) 07:31
9. Countdown (John Coltrane) 04:38
Personnel:
Joe Lovano: tenor saxophone
Hank Jones: piano
George Mraz: bass
Paul Motian: drums and cymbals
Recorded June 11 – 12, 2003, at Avatar Studios, New York, NY, by James Farber
Produced by Joe Lovano
Mastering: Greg Calbi
Cover Photo: John Abbott
Art Direction: Burton Yount
Review:
The tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano works in many forms. He has had a trio with Bill Frisell and Mr. Motian for 20 years that refashions old jazz standards and originals into weird, hiccuping ad-libbed journeys; on recent albums for Blue Note, he has been dealing with large-ensemble be-bop as well as operatic themes arranged for unusual instrumentation and wordless vocals.
But at bottom he’s a soulful, note caressing, tradition loving tenor player, and the music on ”I’m All for You” (Blue Note, May 4) might come closest to his essence. First, because it’s a ballad album. Second, because it’s a quartet with the pianist Hank Jones, one of jazz’s great elders; for almost any jazz musician, working with Mr. Jones is like examining one’s family roots.
But also because Mr. Motian is the drummer. The impressive balance achieved here between Mr. Jones, with his classical be-bop style of accompaniment and linear soloing in bop harmony, and Mr. Motian, with his stark, shifting patterns in perfect time, essentially hands you modern jazz’s great promise in a nutshell. We’ve had most of a century of swing feeling in American music, and it has been translated into vastly different musical languages. So the rubric of jazz can enable musicians who have trod different paths to find some magic spark of a common sensory language.
With standards like ”Monk’s Mood,” ”Like Someone in Love,” and ”Early Autumn,” this quartet (George Mraz is on bass) goes deep into jazz’s traditional pulse, while retaining a great deal of its mystery, its sense of moment-to-moment discovery. It’s also proof of another great promise of jazz that is only sometimes true: the playing can get better as the players get older. Mr. Lovano is 44. Mr. Jones 85, and Mr. Motian 73, but this is easily one of the best records any of them has made.
Ben Ratliff (New York Times)
