Exploring his African roots and jazz branches, drummer
Harper kicks it good on this wide-ranging program. There's plenty to satisfy the most discriminating hard bop fan, and percussive spice that offers contrast.
Harper is joined by up-and-coming tenor saxophonist
JD Allen and trumpeter
Patrick Rickman, bassist
Eric Revis, the great pianist
George Cables, and percussionist
Abdou Mboup. On the swinging side, acknowledgements to
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and the
Clifford Brown-
Max Roach quintet are evident on
Reuben Brown's "Float Like a Butterfly," the more neo-bop "Nefer Mine," and the post-modern "Mr. Hyde." Closer to hard bop is a marvelous take on
Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely," a real stunner. "The Believers," with a long drum solo intro, paraphrases "Love for Sale."
Cables gets two features, telling his blues drenched story on the standard "I Fall in Love Too Easily," but especially on the modal, happy, visceral, "Voodoo Lady." He is his usual brilliant self on all the other selections, the perfect complement to the horns or the power that drives them. In the more continental area,
Harper cuts
Mboup loose on kora and vocals for "Ndaje," or with
Revis on "Miles Sebastian." A Serengeti landscape feeling is present on "The Good Life (For Betty Carter)" and more deeply on "Ballad of Salaam."
Harper is perfectly willing to be a democratic leader. He allows ample space for the
Coltrane-derived
Allen and brightly enunciated
Rickman to do their thing.
Cables is in a class all by himself,
Harper steps back, and the music ebbs and flows with the ease of a waterfall. It's another well plotted musical journey in the continuing triptych of one of America's premier young drummers. Recommended. ~ Michael G. Nastos