Doug MacDonald: Santa Monica Session

Does Doug MacDonald ever sleep? Take a day off? Make a bad recording? Somehow, a listener doubts it. Originally from Philadelphia—home to a few good guitarists, right?—MacDonald moved to Hawaii, Las Vegas, and then to Southern California. His current discography is nothing if not impressive, running to at least three dozen CDs, and MacDonald performs 300 times a year. Do the math. He performs 5 days out of 6 on average, not bad for a player half his age—and MacDonald is 71. He has played bop, pop, and as many formats as you can conjure up, although his current work is mostly small group. While MacDonald does lots of standards, he writes too, and manages to keep some of Southern California's best musicians busy with him. A lot has passed into MacDonald's ears, including Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel, and distinctly at times, LA session player Bob Bain. What comes out is just a gloriously inventive mixture of sounds, feels, genres and harmonies. Add to this, he swings. Hard.

What more can you ask for? Unicorns?

A couple of tracks from the recording can give a listener a nice feel for the project as a whole. Anyone who is a sucker for Sonny Rollins and "Pent Up House" in particular, is going to like this Latin treatment, especially a very curious introduction. Talk about misdirection. MacDonald's solo is especially inventive, and with Bill Cantos' organ chord-comping, free to go most anywhere. And it does, with an exclamation point! The whole thing reaches an arch conclusion, pushed along by Kevin Winard and Hussain Jiffry. How many times can a medium-tempo "Walkin" be persuasive? MacDonald enters his solo with a kind of "let me tell you what this is about" phrase followed by a myriad of quotes, near-quotes and a very different release into the final chorus. "Perdido" as a montuno? Why not? The theme does not emerge until the second chorus, this time with Cantos taking a lead and the rhythm shifting from Latin to straight-four, and back, sort of. With maybe "Tea for Two" thrown in for a measure.

What makes this entire recording so much fun is listening to the inventiveness with which well known material is handled. It sounds natural, not forced, and not gimmicky, or just some device for the sake of difference. There are probably far worse ways to spend an afternoon lining up MacDonald's recent CDs on a player and just patting feet. Or perhaps an evening of live music at one of his gigs if somewhere in SoCal is home.