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GARDENIAS FOR LADY DAY
(Columbia)
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In terms of sheer control, no one plays jazz saxophone better than James Carter. No one else I know of has the ability to give each note such distinct shape and color, to alternate passages of breathy Ben Webster glisses with post-Coltrane stuttering sheets of sound, and to render those notes with authority in every register on every horn. We last heard from Carter on disc with two simultaneous 2000 Atlantic CDs — a tribute to swing-jazz-guitarist Django Reinhardt and a free-funk electric session. As eclectic as ever, and now on Columbia, Carter gives us this concise (46-minute) Holiday tribute, which mixes four Billie-covered tunes with four other songs of her era, most played with a jazz rhythm section and small string orchestra. In the opening ballad, "Gloria," Carter enters in full Big Ben flower, milking every line with vibrato-laden warmth, then breaking for a cadenza rocking with thunder and lightning. "Sunset" features four different horns (at times, Carter is his own overdubbed reed section) over a cha-cha-cha beat. On "(I Wonder) Where Our Love Has Gone," his tenor sax glides over a slow Barry White string groove before turning hysterical. "Strange Fruit" is meticulously arranged among high and low strings, with tenor sax, contrabass and bass clarinets, and vocalist Miche Braden’s Betty Carter–like heady timbre (she’s also featured on "More Than You Know"), before breaking into angry free-squalling. In one emblematic double-time run on Billy Strayhorn’s "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing," Carter takes the baritone sax from its basso profundo bottom to its high lonesome upper end. His soprano on "Indian Summer" has a rich, Bechet-like attack, the band shifting into double time. It’s hard not to laugh with pleasure when Carter takes a split-second drop from a high-end trill to a quick bottom-end growl — an idea most saxophonists wouldn’t have, never mind execute.
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