Reggie Quinerly: The Thousandth Scholar

The Thousandth Scholar is Los Angeles-based drummer and composer Reggie Quinerly's fifth album, each out on his Redefinition label. Quinerly themes his albums. His debut was Music Inspired By Freedmantown (2012), a tribute to the Houston neighborhood where he was born and raised. It was followed by Invictus (2015), a salute to hard bop, Words In Love (2018), which dealt with vocals, and New York Nowhere (2021), a portrait of life in the city (Quinerly studied at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and at the Juilliard School).

The new album has an Afro-Caribbean / Latin theme, subtle at times, upfront at others. And it cooks. Its inspiration was a quote by Ahmad Jamal (see the YouTube below), whose Blue Moon (Jazz Village, 2012) is one of Quinerly's favorite albums. Like Jamal's on that album, Quinerly's band is a piano trio+percussionist quartet, an exceptionally talented and well fused one completed by the Havana-born Grammy-nominated pianist Manuel Valera, a friend of Quinerly's since the pair attended the New School in the early 2000s, bassist Matt Brewer, and the inventive Colombian-born percussionist Samuel Torres. Although Quinerly wrote all but one of the eight tunes (Valera's "Invernal"), The Thousandth Scholar is really as much Valera's album as it is Quinerly's. Valera co-produced with Quinerly, arranged all the tracks and is the chief soloist, on-mic practically throughout. Brewer takes a couple of brief solos, ditto Torres. Quinerly never solos (one has to love that on a drummer's album).

Valera has named his primary influences as Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. This embrace of the US piano tradition contributes to the album's balance of Latin and straight-ahead jazz, which is all the more engaging for being so uncalculated. "Ray's Tune" is barely filtered mambo with some terrific breaks from Torres and an in-the-tradition ostinato from Valera. "Folk Song" and "Skain's Blues" also wear their Latin origins on their sleeves. Elsewhere we are talking Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish tinge" with the accent on tinge.

The Thousandth Scholar is fresh, hard driving, unencumbered by genre clichés, and recommended to lovers of expansive piano-led jazz.