Zach Green: Chatterbox

On Chatterbox, young Ohio-born, New York-based composer/arranger Zach Green has written most of the music, arranged all of it, and chosen a well-modulated sextet to bring it to life. The term "young" certainly applies to Green, a graduate of Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music who also sings and plays guitar and percussion (but not here) and is yet several years shy of his thirtieth birthday—which hasn't stopped him from forming an eleven-piece ensemble, Zach Green's Elevention, or co-founding the vocal jazz group The New Standard.

Green's first-class arranging skills are perhaps most visible on the album's lone "standard," Paul McCartney and John Lennon's tasteful "Eleanor Rigby," popularized by the Beatles and imparted with warmth and intelligence by Green's talented ensemble. As to Green's five compositions, they are splendid, with the flag-waving "Chatterbox" and groovy, mid-tempo "Chill Pill" especially engaging. "Spring in Ohio" is lovely, as are "Meandering" and "Self Care," showing Green's gift for melody, harmony and shading, but lacking the intensity that animates and amplifies "Chatterbox" or "Chill Pill"—although "Spring in Ohio" accelerates midstream for plucky solos by pianist Sterling Cozza and trombonist Colin Babcock.

Speaking of solos, they are admirable throughout, as Cozza (electric piano on "Meandering" and "Chill Pill") and Babcock (muted on "Chill Pill") set the bar high for trumpeter Eli Goldstein (flugelhorn on "Self Care"), bassist Dan Finn's ("Meandering") and drummer Gary Kerkezou's ("Chill Pill"). It is a challenge that everyone eagerly accepts. Chatterbox is one of those unforeseen but no less impressive albums that seem to turn up now and then from next to nowhere. In the realm of pleasant surprises, mark this one special—marred only by its skimpy thirty-six-minute playing time.