Jean Toussaint 4
Tate Song
Lyte Records ***1/2
Saxophonist Jean Toussaint has composure like Terence Blanchard has, his former band mate in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and displays this readily on Tate Song. That’s a given but a scarce commodity nonetheless and stemming from this there’s a head of steam built quickly on opener ‘Mood Mode’ here, pianist Andrew McCormack providing plenty of foundation while Troy Miller on drums who produced the album keeps it steady. ‘Mulgrew’, the second track (I’m guessing it’s named after the late Mulgrew Miller who Toussaint also performed with in the Messengers), allows for solemn meditation Toussaint opening up the bottom end of his tenor saxophone to find new places to explore, more feeling to measure in tribute, while Troy Miller fills and pounds, expansive within the concentric circles of improvising consciousness. A quartet record, the album’s fourth member is bassist Larry Bartley who plays with Lineage and Abdullah Ibrahim and whose role is more difficult to gauge in the early tracks but whose loping swing on ‘My Dear Ruby’, three words in a different order recalling the title of Monk’s otherwise unrelated tune, develops stimulatingly threaded in to the weave. Toussaint’s tone is rich and authoritative, flexible like a Dexter Gordon in his heyday but also spiritual at times in the Coltranian episodes and there is more depth and resource on Tate Song than any of the Toussaint albums I’ve heard hitherto. His tone is brotherly and warm throughout but there’s also plenty of drama on the frenetic ‘Rice (for CR Peppers)’, but tenderness too on ‘Tate Song’, the title track named after Toussaint’s son, and more besides on remaining tracks ‘Tunnel Vision’, with its Rollins-esque swagger and fizzy touches from McCormack, the standard ‘These Foolish Things’ taken at an amiable saunter, ‘Vera Cruz’, and ‘Vista’ best of the material here on which Toussaint switches to soprano and whose every flutter Miller shadows perfectly.
Released on 24 February
The Jean Toussaint Quartet tour in March and dates include Riverhouse Barn, Walton-on-Thames (14 March); Colchester Arts Centre, Colchester (16 March); Ronnie Scott’s, London (18 March); The Old Clee Club, Grimsby (19 March); 7 Jazz, Leeds (20 March); Millennium Hall, Sheffield (21 March); The Hive, Shrewsbury (22 March); Hawthorne Theatre, Welwyn Garden City (23 March); Everyman Studio Theatre, Cheltenham (24 March); and Hidden Rooms, Cambridge (27 March)