Time: 64:04
Size: 146.7 MB
Styles: Piano jazz
Year: 2004
Art: Front
[ 7:02] 1. I Told You So
[12:01] 2. Speak No Evil
[10:38] 3. A Time For Love
[ 4:20] 4. Giant Steps
[10:51] 5. From Dream To Dream
[13:28] 6. In Your Own Sweet Way
[ 5:41] 7. Oleo
Pianist Kirk Lightsey and bassist Rufus Reid first played together on a regular basis as members of Dexter Gordon's quartet in the 1980s. Their duo session is particularly special due to the tight musical communication between the two players, and the fact that it took place at Bradley's. Open for 25 years in New York and usually featuring piano/bass duos, Bradley's was one of the Big Apple's top after-hours clubs and a place for pianists to play before their peers. Lightsey and Reid (who is showcased on Benny Golson's "From Dream to Dream") explore seven sophisticated compositions, all but Johnny Mandel's "A Time for Love" originating in the jazz world. The two musicians are heard at the top of their game (which two decades later they happily still are) and come up with an endless series of fresh variations, including on Wayne Shorter's haunting "Speak No Evil" and a cooking rendition of "Oleo." ~Scott Yanow
Nights Of Bradley's
Thx very much!!
ReplyDeleteI’ve thanked you guys for Kirk Lightsey postings before. Now I get to thank you once again. I was in New York recently for a couple of days, by the way. Had occasion to be on University Place, where Bradley’s used to stand . . . where Kirk Lightsey and many another jazz great used to perform . . . where the present album, which has the Bradley’s name in its very title, was recorded. Hard to find even the ghosts there nowadays. Bradley’s was gone even before I myself decided to bail on New York in 2002. The Cookery, at University Place and 8th Street, where Alberta Hunter belted ’em until there was simply no more voice to give, well into her 80s, shuttered down even earlier. What once was The Cookery turned into a BBQ joint. Now it’s a Capital1 Bank. Mickey Ruskin’s legendary Kipling’s Last Resort, also known as Chinese Chance, admittedly not a jazz joint but a secondary hangout for the Warhol crowd, shut down even before The Cookery. Cedar Tavern, also not a jazz joint, but famously the bar of the New York School of abstract impressionism (De Kooning, Rothko, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock) is also long since gone. Of the great University Place venues, only Knickerbocker, at the corner of 9th Street, has withstood the flood tides. But Knickerbocker – where I certainly spent many a pleasant evening (and once, for a time, now that I think of it, I even found a Knickerbocker waitress to date) – was never at the same level as Bradley’s. I remember seeing the showman and Sinatra wannabe Harry Connick, Jr. perform there once. I remember his doing “The Sheik of Araby” with a white cloth napkin on his head. A sheik’s headdress, in other words. Seemed vulgar at the time. In retrospect, it makes one gag. But there was something Knickerbockerish, and not Bradley’s-ish, about that. That was not the Bradley’s style. But, to return to the main theme, I am once again indebted to you Silky people for yet another fine Kirk Lightsey posting, and I confess that I like this one even better than others because it really captures what I think of as Kirk’s best sound, which also happens to have been the Bradley’s sound. Kirk on piano. Rufus Reid on bass. No drums. No horns. Nothing else.
ReplyDeleteMessage said I was limited to 4k characters; here's the rest of what I had written: I confess that sometimes I wonder to what extent my enthusiasm for KL is really a level-playing-field enthusiasm just for KL – I mean, the exact same enthusiasm I would feel for KL if I had never heard him except on records – and to what extent nostalgia for a certain kind of magical late evening in a Greenwich Village that is now remote from me in +/- 30 years of time and a good many thousands of miles of space. You have been helping me sort these feelings of mine out. And the answer, I am discovering, unsurprisingly, is that this enthusiasm of mine derives from both of those two components. Partly it’s Lightsey (and others of that amazing Bradley’s “stable”) I still respond to. Partly it’s the way these Lightsey albums close the gap on all those years. In the 80s, people a generation older than I am lamented the disappearance of so many great clubs and cabarets and lounges of the 40s and 50s. Seems absurd, but now it’s my turn to lament what was left of that New York jazz life in the 80s and 90s before it was all swept away by wave after wave after wave of rock and roll. (Well, let me add since I’ve gone this far – you lose one room, you gain another. The room I’m liking best in these my Brazilian years is the kind of tatty mezzanine piano bar in the Novo Mundo Hotel across from the old Catete Palace, in Catete, in Rio. No, it’s not Bradley’s, that goes without saying, but you can be pretty sure that when you cross the threshold into the Novo Mundo it’s not going to matter what year it is outside on the street, inside it’s going to be 1962 or thereabouts. 1962? I was going to write 1955, and then I realized that wasn’t right. The difference? By 1962, bossa nova was already on its feet, and in 1962 bossa nova was still exciting. Why do I say “still”? There was a posting here the other day of a recent rendering of a few of the bossa nova standards – Garota de Ipanema, Águas de Março, etc. – by a talented guitarist by the name of Eduardo Kusdra. Wouldn’t have wanted to say it as a comment on the posting itself. Wouldn’t want Kusdra himself to happen on my expression of disappointment. But those great bossa nova standards should maybe be left alone for a while. Kusdra, talented as he is, certainly doesn’t do anything in the way of freshening them up. He may even push them just that much farther into easy listening/elevator music territory, as if there were any more distance for pushing in that direction. Of course, if I heard Kusdra at the Novo Mundo, in other words, if I heard him live as I used to hear Kirk Lightsey live, I’d probably be gushing.) Anyone who’s really into the Lightsey album I have commenting on might want to read something of the background of the album at http://sunnysidezone.com/album/the-nights-of-bradleys. I’d apologize for going on so long, but no one, after all, is obliged to read this. You read it only if you want to.
ReplyDeletewould you be so kind and reload this album? many thanks before
ReplyDeleteNew link posted!
Deletegreat, thanks a lot!!
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