Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Jeff Healey & The Jazz Wizards with Chris Barber: It's T...

278

Jeff Healey & The Jazz Wizards with Chris Barber: It's Tight Like That

By

View read count
Jeff Healey & The Jazz Wizards with Chris Barber: It's Tight Like That
In the United States, the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties yielded a brand of upbeat jazz saturated with sexual innuendo and heedlessness. Across the northern border, Jeff Healey, a Canadian blues-rock guitarist, felt the significance of this traditional jazz. In his latest outing, he and his eight-piece band, the Jazz Wizards, conjur up some old magic.

Healey, who has been blind since infancy, plays the trumpet vivaciously on the earlier pieces. "Bugle Call Rag best displays his effervescent control over the brass instrument as he kicks the album off with a quick-stepping call to arms. Sometimes he switches to the guitar, supporting brass and reed solos with an eccentric dexterity.

Chris Barber, an established British jazz trombonist, guest stars on the album, but he is most endearing when he provides vocals on "Basin Street Blues (a Spencer Williams song made famous by Louis Armstrong) and his own "Goin' Up the River. Barber's voice feels silky without being entirely mellifluous, and even his meandering trombone solo in the former song is honeyed with joviality. On the latter tune, he walks the line of thoughtful doldrums, his vulnerability permeating the atmosphere, but Healey's climactic trumpeting and Gary Scriven's sweeping drumming maintain the record's buoyancy.

Healey also puts his voice to work on several songs, and though the coarseness of his baritone is to be expected of a blues crooner, it falls seamlessly into place and adds a contemporary texture to the standards. Even when his voice cracks at the start of "Someday Sweetheart, he follows through and the audience falls in love with his sympathetic tone.

Most of the tunes were performed live at Hugh's Room, a folk venue in Toronto, and since each song was always brimming with vim—upbeat melodies nestled between occasionally seductive blues—boisterous applause always followed. The octet produced a sound so clean that if it wasn't for the ovations, one would not know they were performing live. In contrast, there is a multi-dimensional quality that makes the band's camaraderie, or as Healey calls it, "musical interaction, palpable. Throughout, Healey and Barber uphold the idée fixe, a fast and loose frivolity that dominated both '20s jazz and this album.

Track Listing

Bugle Call Rag; Sing You Sinners; Basin Street Blues; Little Girl; Someday Sweetheart; Darktown Strutters Ball; Confessin'; Keep It to Yourself; Sheik of Araby; Goin' Up the River; It's Tight Like That/Wipe 'em Off.

Personnel

Jeff Healey: trumpet, guitar, vocals (2,4,5,7,9,11); Chris Barber: trombone, vocals (3,10,11); Christopher Plock: clarinet, soprano and alto saxophone (1-3,5-8,10,11), vocal (6); Terra Hazelton: vocal (8); Drew Jurecka: violin; Jesse Barksdale: guitar; Brian Graville: piano (1-3,5-8,10,11); Colin Bray: bass; Gary Scriven: drums; Reid Kaiser: piano (4,9); Ross Wooldridge: clarinet (4,9); Gary Scriven: washboard (4,9).

Album information

Title: It's Tight Like That | Year Released: 2006 | Record Label: Stony Plain Records

Tags

Comments


PREVIOUS / NEXT




Support All About Jazz

Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

Near

More

Tramonto
John Taylor
Ki
Natsuki Tamura / Satoko Fujii
Duality Pt: 02
Dom Franks' Strayhorn
The Sound of Raspberry
Tatsuya Yoshida / Martín Escalante

Popular

Old Home/New Home
The Brian Martin Big Band
My Ideal
Sam Dillon
Ecliptic
Shifa شفاء - Rachel Musson, Pat Thomas, Mark Sanders
Lado B Brazilian Project 2
Catina DeLuna & Otmaro Ruíz

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.

Install All About Jazz

iOS Instructions:

To install this app, follow these steps:

All About Jazz would like to send you notifications

Notifications include timely alerts to content of interest, such as articles, reviews, new features, and more. These can be configured in Settings.