Mark Sherman: Bop Contest

Following four well-received albums on which he played piano, the versatile Mark Sherman has placed the keyboard in the capable hands of Donald Vega and returned to his main instrument, the vibraphone, for the eloquent and delightful Bop Contest, Sherman's twenty-second recording in a prestigious career that has spanned nearly half a century.

Although Sherman has shared the studio with a who's who of renowned bassists, he had never released an album, until now, with the Hall of Famer, fellow Juilliard School instructor and most-recorded jazz bassist ever, Ron Carter, in the lineup, an oversight that has at last been corrected, as the peerless Carter flanks Vega and celebrated drummer Carl Allen in Sherman's blue-chip rhythm section.

While this is by and large a quartet date, the group is enlarged—and enriched—by trumpeter Joe Magnarelli on Sherman's original compositions, the charming "Love Always Always Love" and spunky "Bop Contest." The album opens with Oliver Nelson's tasteful "111-44" and includes a pair of sunny compositions by pianist Cedar Walton: "Bremond's Blues" and "Martha's Prize," each of which is followed by a standard—"Blues" by "My One and Only Love," "Prize" by one of the loveliest ballads ever written, Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael's plaintive "Skylark," the last an overdubbed "duet" with Sherman alone on vibes and piano.

Sherman is a superb craftsman, abiding somewhere between Lionel Hampton and Terry Gibbs, while the rhythm section is invariably sharp and supportive. Bop Contest is an excellent session from start to finish, and would be rated as such were there a few more than thirty-seven minutes between said start and finish.