Martin Speake - My Ideal

Bitrate: 320K/s

Time: 40:12

Size: 92.0 MB

Styles: Saxophone jazz

Year: 2004

Art: Front

[5:53] 1. Everything Happens To Me

[4:13] 2. My Ideal

[4:06] 3. What Is This Thing Called Love

[4:39] 4. So In Love

[5:40] 5. Loverman

[3:05] 6. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

[3:34] 7. Stardust

[5:36] 8. How Insensitive

[3:22] 9. You Must Believe In Spring

British alto saxophonist Speake duets with a regular Transatlantic associate, the composer and pianist Ethan Iverson - better known as one-third of the lively and now fashionable genre-breakout band the Bad Plus. Although that full-on trio's robust irony, percussion-driven ferocity and raucous reworking of old pop hits is on another, noisier planet to these stripped-down duets exploring standards and ballads, including Michel Legrand's You Must Believe in Spring and a variety of Cole Porters, Jerome Kerns and a Jobim. But Speake's soft tone and undemonstrative audacity found an excellent counterpoise in Iverson, who is as likely to veer off into streams of classical arpeggios as he is to play swing or stride, though he does plenty of those too.

This music was recorded in December 2002 (and produced by Iain Ballamy, no stranger to saxophone understatement) when the pair were touring the UK, and their absorbing live show is recalled by Iverson's technically-sweeping free-classical upsurge after Speake's smoke-rings on Everything Happens to Me, the duo's limping, Monkish arrangement of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and the almost sinister idling saunter of Jobim's How Insensitive. Iverson's powers are probably better revealed in these bare surroundings than they are in the Bad Plus. ~John Fordham

My Ideal

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