Terry Gibbs Legacy Band: The Terry Gibbs Songbook

Legacy Band? At age ninety-eight, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs—the last remaining member of a legendary group of jazz musicians who defined the big-band era in America and helped expand and sharpen the music's vocabulary—hasn't finished writing his own legacy, which is why this album is subtitled "The Terry Gibbs Songbook."

Although best known as a player, Gibbs, as it turns out, is a splendid composer as well, and wrote every one of the album's fifteen songs, adding lyrics to a couple, with verses elsewhere courtesy of Michael Dees, Arthur Hamilton, Bobby Troup, Steve Allen and Jerry Gladstone. He even sings (in his own sweet way) and plays two-finger piano on the well-named "Now's the Time to Groove." As no lyricist is named on the ballad "If I Knew Then," the presumption is that Gibbs wrote both music and lyrics to that one.

Speaking of vocalists, Danny Bacher is the main man here, and he proves an admirable fit, giving every lyric its due and sparring playfully with Gibbs on "Now's the Time." When Bacher isn't holding court, the tunes are in the capable hands of the six-member Legacy Band, trimly anchored by Gibbs' son, drummer Gerry, with the marvelous Tom Ranier on piano, Mike Gurrola on bass and a superlative two-tenor front line consisting of Scott Hamilton and Harry Allen (whose solos are unlisted but essentially interchangeable).

As for the elder Gibbs' themes, they are bright and pleasing with an emphasis on soulfulness and emotion and a handful ("Let's Go to Rio," "And That's Why They Call It the Blues," "Stay with Me Tonight," "Sweet Young Song of Love") that stand out among the herd. That's not to say that anything else is less than engaging, as each one of Gibbs' songs has a temperament and charm of its own, and his ballads are well worth one's time and awareness.

As Terry Gibbs explains in his liner notes, he never intended that an album of his music should be recorded; he simply wanted to hear one of the songs he had written while in his nineties performed by professional musicians. But after sending a copy to lyricist Alan Bergman, he writes, one thing led to another...and now fifteen of his more than two hundred compositions have been recorded by the Legacy Band. While Gibbs calls that "a fluke," most listeners would call it a stroke of good fortune. Legacy or no, these songs deserve to be heard, and Terry Gibbs' stature as a jazz legend has grown even larger because of them.

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