San Diego-based guitarist Dan Papaila rejoins with mid-1970s working buddy, drummer Larance Marable, for this straightahead outing of nine tunes with pianist Mike Wofford and bassist Andy Simpkins. Having worked with jazz organ combos in the L.A. area through 1980, Papaila contributes the plucky, blues-tinged title tune (you’ll have to imagine the chugging B-3) and classics from Broadway and bandstand. Papaila’s mostly single-line, melodic style keeps the session in a relaxed mode, whether covering Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love” with switching time signatures, or cranking up and kickin’ the blues on Bob Dylan’s “Watchin’ the River Flow,” or navigating the racing reinvention of the Weill classic, “Speak Low.” The focus of this October 1996 studio date is on easygoing rhythms and accessible (often bluesy) melodies. With Marable (past collaborator of Wes Montgomery) adding plenty of verve, Papaila thrives in such surroundings, making this one of the best recent guitar-led sessions.
Originally PublishedRelated 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.
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time