Jazz After Midnight – All Selections Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder; featuring Houston Person, Bill Charlap, Don Sickler, Louis Hayes & The Cannonball Legacy Band, James Spaulding, Frank Morgan, Larry Coryell, Mike LeDonne, Cedar Walton, Joey DeFrancesco, David “Fathead” Newman – HighNote Stereo-only SACD HCD 6018, 60:00 ****:
The HighNote series of jazz compilations continues with these two releases, in nicely-designed jewel-box-alternates but with little notes. However, all the performers involved on each track and timings are included. The B3 disc will bring a smile to any Hammond aficionado. There’s a wide variety of B3-based music here – not all just the usual funky blues played by the standard B3/guitar/drums trio. There are larger bands including tenor sax, trumpet, even doublebass on a few tracks. (Usually the B3 doubles for the doublebass in the bass end.) It’s fun to have both Joey and his father playing on some of these ten tracks.
TrackList: The Cat, Cold Duck Time, Delilah, My Blues Is Funky, That Dirty Thang, Watch Me Fly, 160 Million Dollar Chinese Man, In the Bag, The Preacher, Put It Where You Want It.
The Jazz After Midnight SACD is also an excellent compilation; I wouldn’t say a single track is a loser on this one. I even discovered two artists I want to hear more of: Flutist James Spaulding, who delivers a nice midnite hour feeling to La Mesha, with a front line of Don Sickler on Flugelhorn and John Hicks on piano. Hicks returns with one of my favorite guitarists, Larry Coryell, in a lovely and lyrical treatment of Coltrane’s Naima. I was unfamiliar also with organist Mike LeDonne, who is handles one track here as well as another on the Funky Organ disc. The flow of the selections is just right, whether this is going to serve as a relaxing background to prepare you for sleep or perhaps as what we used to call make-out music, eh? The c.$10 price point is also a nice feature.
The sound on both of these albums is excellent, as to be expected for sure in regard to the second entry, since it comes from the skilled hands of the recording engineer associated with Prestige and Blue Note. However, I should point out that although I can normally detect enhancements in the stereo SACD layer in comparison to the CD layer, I could hear no audible differences between the two with any of this series.
TrackList: If I Ruled the World, Gone But Not Forgotten, The Two of Them, La Mesha, Crazy He Calls Me, Naima, Superstar, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, What’s New, Georgia on My Mind.
– John Henry
