Ben Sidran celebrates groove jazz on Nick’s Bump (Liquid 8). The veteran keyboardist road-tested the material-comprising both classics and originals-for a couple of years before taking it into the studio, and the result is a studio album that swings with the spontaneity and inventiveness of live performance. Eddie Harris’ “Mean Greens” is a band workout that’s both lively and soulful, while the Sidran composition “Blue Panther” is a bluesy number that slinks and prowls like the animal in the title.
The multitalented Sidran is also a broadcaster (among other things), and he incorporates snippets of his interviews with Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey into two tracks. During Sidran’s flute-enhanced take on Harris’ “Listen Here,” Gillespie proclaims, “I told you so,” while Blakey’s appearance on Donald Byrd’s “Black Jack” includes the observation that “the music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life.” With an album as thoroughly enjoyable as Nick’s Bump, it certainly will.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro