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Chuck Hedges and The Milwaukee Connection: Just Jammin
ByArbors Records has provided him that chance. The result is a gentle album of “swinging chamber jazz, possibly what the pioneering Benny Goodman sextet might sound like today, if BG, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, et al., were still alive and playing,” as Mike Drew, jazz critic and writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, opines in the liner notes.
Well, I’m not sure I would’ve gone that far, but you’ve got the idea. From their assurance, musicianship, blend, and joie de vivre, these are obviously serious jazzmen who enjoy their music-making enormously and want to share it. To be sure, the music is relaxed and easy to share; as I’m listening in my office, my wife walks past the door, stops, and then comes in just to sit and listen for a spell.
This CD provides more than 75 minutes of mellow music on only eleven tunes, so the musicians have plenty of room to stretch out a bit. Ellington’s “Solitude” runs a little more than three minutes, but all the others range between five and ten minutes in length. The longest is also the slowest and moodiest: Victor Young and Ned Washington’s “Ghost of a Chance,” with a delightful guitar quote from “It Might as Well Be Spring,” and tasty solos all around. If you like quotes, listen to Sullivan’s guitar solos: on “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart,” for David Rose’s “Holiday for Strings”; right at the beginning on “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me,” for Stephen Foster’s “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”; and on “Samba Dese Days,” for Youmans and Caesar’s “Tea for Two.”
The two most up-tempo tunes are left for near the end: “The Man I Love” and “Samba Dese Days,” Sophie Tucker’s old theme song, with a lilting Latin arrangement of “Midnight Sun” sandwiched in between. Any lingering doubts I might have harbored about the technical and musical abilities of these six musicians have been neatly dispelled, long before the last echoes die out.
Visit www.arborsrecords.com on the web.
Track Listing
Broadway; Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Sugar; I Don
Personnel
Chuck Hedges
clarinetHenry (Bucky) Buckwalter (vibes), Dave Sullivan (guitar), Gary Meisner (piano), Mike Britz (bass), and Andy LoDuca (drums)
Album information
Title: Just Jammin | Year Released: 2002 | Record Label: Arbors Records
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