Ari Ambrose - Whatever Happens

Steeplechase 31617

Tenor saxophonist Ari Ambrose routinely uses his Steeplechase contract as a podium to expound on the jazz canon from his personal perspective. It’s a preoccupation in common with many of his peers and on this latest album, his eighth for the label, he weights the program with superannuated standards in a ratio of two to one. The songbook includes crusty surnames like McHugh and Van Heusen and Ambrose’s partiality reflects in the aged, slightly oxidized look of his horn. He may have a neck craned toward the oldies, but his individualistic tenor approach ensures that his preferences end up far from boilerplate. Familiar colleagues all, pianist George Colligan, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and the aptly named Billy Drummond abet his efforts.

The emphasis rests on relaxation and romance and liner author Mark Gardner rightly likens the session to a classic Prestige Moodsville date in temperament and design. Brushes serve as Drummond’s primary implement and he provides whispery accompaniment on the opening numbers, Okegwo fingering similarly low-tension lines. Colligan sways from sedate comping to elegant leads, his preference for post-Evans pianistics overt, but not slavish. Ambrose takes the amorous settings as an opportunity to accentuate the speech-like properties of his horn, voicing timbral and register gradations that rarely adhere to predictable conventions. It’s in this manner that he rescues the session from typical warm milk and cookies ballad affair. He regularly switches from broad shouldered Websterian purrs and Jug-isms to willowy Getz territory. Like blues songs, the vessels are familiar to the point of fault, but the tractability of Ambrose’s tone and articulation brushes away the cobwebs and breathes in renewed life. Lest the date linger too long in the sleepy realm of crackling hearths and bearskin rugs, he also includes back-to-back burners “Emily” and “Unknown Side” that shake any collecting dust off Drummond’s sticks and Okegwo’s strings.

Allow me to return to Ambrose’s horn as a means of bringing things full circle. It’s no doubt a spurious correlation, but I’ve been noticing for a while a positive relationship between preference for an absence of lacquer and preponderance of talent. Just reference Joe Henderson, Loren Stillman, Seamus Blake and a legion of others for additional evidence. Whatever the case, Ambrose has come up with another winner, his continued Steeplechase stewardship all but a certainty.

[Steeplechase titles are available directly through Stateside Distributors: Stateside AT prodigy.net]

~ Derek Taylor