(Howard Alden, guitar; Ken Peplowski, tenor sax & clarinet)
I’ve been playing the heck out of this one in my car; love duos of instruments like this because they seem designed for stereo playback. When the versatile Peplowski takes up the sax and they do something Latinesque like Joe Puma’s Bossango, I’m reminded of the sounds of the very first bossa nova album by American players – Bud Shank and Laurindo Almeida’s.
The two performers began their musical connection in the early 1980s. They talk in the note booklet about both looking for interesting songs that were open to varied interpretations. They found that when they played at jazz festivals they were usually stuck with the lowest common denominator of tunes to play so everybody gets a chance, and they wanted something different in repertory. That’s what you get in these 13 tracks from such names as Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Evans, Cole Porter, Bud Powell and Leonard Bernstein – but not the big hits of those composers. I was unfamiliar with Ellington’s Who Knows, for example. It was a track on his 1953 Piano Reflections LP and sounds like something by Monk! The two tunes from the late guitarist Joe Puma are a kick too, brought in by his friend and fellow guitarist Alden.
These two cats have amazing, almost telepathic connection and find fresh and clever ways to handle each tune and make it something distinctive from what comes before and what follows. I especially dig the technical virtuosity of Peplowski on the licorice stick. I just heard another super clarinetist in person – Anat Cohen. It’s great that these performers are carrying on the jazz clarinet tradition and adding new licks to the achievements of the old masters such as Shaw and Goodman.
TrackList: Pow Wow, Dream Dancing, Did I Remember?, Very Early, Who Knows, After All, Bossango, I See Your Face Before Me, Tempus Fugit, The Land of the Loon, The Things We Did Last Summer, Panama, Lucky to be Me.
– John Henry
