Joe Lovano & Hank Jones - Kids: Duets Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola

Blue Note

As with any genre of music, jazz is populated with old reliables, players with whom one can feel safe in shelling out shekels no matter what the setting. Saxophonist Joe Lovano has recently slipped into that category for me. He's been in the game for over three decades, placing his horn in contexts ranging from swing to postbop to free and always remaining mindful of the Coltrane adage of knowing his instruments inside and out. Whether it's the pastoral tone poem jazz of the Paul Motian Trio or a big band Sinatra tribute, Lovano always has something pithy to communicate through his horns and a personal vernacular with which to say it. The parameters of Hank Jones' music are more pronounced. His preferences pretty much begin with swing and end with bop, but there are few who have found as wide a playing field within those idioms as he has. A year and four months shy of nonagenarian status, there's no need for him to do otherwise. Both men are ardent and active listeners with a deep appreciation for the music's history. That similarity yields a wide swathe of common ground on this recent concert taped at a corporate sponsored New York City venue.

An eleven-tune set contains no surprises in terms of selections. It's aged bottles and familiar wine, the sort of fare that Jones has been trading in for a half century or more, songs so second nature that they've practically fused with his musical DNA. Where the joy manifests is through the rapport of the two cross-generational friends, conversing in front of an audience that seems well aware of their good fortune. Lovano's tenor is warm and loquacious, slaloming through the changes of "Lady Luck" as Jones comps brightly beneath him. "Soultrane" and "Lazy Afternoon" accord him room to revisit Prestige-era Coltrane, his robust though relaxed lines lacing with Jones' accommodating chords. On tunes like "Charlie Chan" and "Budo" Jones uses bop bullion as his base, but also interpolates slivers of stride and sustains near impeccable swing in his elegant two-handed patterns. To possess digits that dexterous at his age is a minor miracle in and of itself. Saxophone and piano duets are certainly nothing new and many viable purchases are but a mouse click away. In the case of musicians of the caliber of Jones and Lovano, "newness" is hardly an issue. The pleasure comes in hearing them place their personal stamp on a songbook of classics. The standing seal of approval on their respective records of accomplishment endures intact.

~ Derek Taylor