In their jointly written “Artist’s Choice” column on Tootie Heath for JazzTimes, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street spotlighted the diversity of the drummer’s sideman work, choosing a handful of recordings that illustrated Heath’s adaptability. On Philadelphia Beat, the Heath-Iverson-Street trio’s followup to 2013’s Tootie’s Tempo and 2010’s Live at Smalls, the track list is also rather disparate, reaching to such wide-ranging sources as Monk, Bach, Eubie Blake, Yusef Lateef and the disco classic “I Will Survive.”
Attempting to navigate such a crazy-quilt roadmap, in lesser hands, might court disaster, but given Iverson’s work in the Bad Plus, much of whose career has focused on unexpected re-imaginings drawn from a bottomless well, there’s nothing to fear. The album’s dozen interpretive performances-there are no original compositions-are stylistically all over the place, but the trio’s collective bond is airtight.
Albert “Tootie” Heath/Ethan Iverson/Ben Street: Philadelphia Beat
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