Doin’ The Crazy Walk
Old Fashioned Love
You Stepped Out Of A Dream
Black Beauty
In The Middle Of A Kiss
Coffee Grinder
Angel Eyes
Dream Man
Louisiana
Petite Fleur
What Can I Say After I Say I’m Sorry
One Morning In May
Deep In A Dream
Russian Lullaby
Soft Winds
Fine & Dandy
John Hallam (clarinet, tenor and baritone
saxophones); Jeff Barnhart (piano, vocals);
Keith Stephen (guitar, banjo); Bruce Rollo
(bass)
Rec. at the Rosehill Theatre, Whitehaven,
April 2007
This is the second such meeting
between British reedsman John Hallam and American
pianist Jeff Barnhart. The songs are cut from
classic cloth with Ellington, Bechet, Razaf,
van Heusen, and Carmichael amongst them. There’s
a fine supporting duo of guitarist Keith Stephen
and bass player Bruce Rollo. Not only that
but the recording quality, at the Rosehill
Theatre, is unobtrusively fine.
The playing has splendid
springy warmth to it and is sufficiently varied
– Hallam plays clarinet, tenor and baritone
saxophones – never to allow the ear to become
waterlogged by repetitive arrangements or
limited tonal resources. There’s a fine outing
and solos all round on Doin’ The Crazy
Walk which includes Barnhart’s well known
Fats Waller vocal emulations – really quite
good.
Keith Stephen plays well
behind the vocal on Old Fashioned Love.
Here there’s more than a touch of Pee Wee
Russell about Hallam’s clarinet playing and
with Barnhart’s Waller pianistics the spirit
of Billy Banks Rhythm Makers is, fortunately,
not too far away. There’s plenty of stride
piano and rich toned baritone on Coffee
Grinder and a good change of pace and
idiom with You Stepped Out Of A Dream.
Bechet’s Petite Fleur
is taken on the baritone as a kind of tango.
Here’s an example of fresh thinking when it
comes to arrangements and it’s something that
a small group such as this can do extremely
well. They seem to have lent an ear to Soprano
Summit in this respect and the results are
laudable; there’s certainly a touch of Dick
Hyman in Barnhart’s playing it seems to me,
and the Davern-Wilbur influence on Hallam.
One feels this again in One Morning In
May where Keith Stephen might be said
to don the mantle and plectrum of Marty Grosz
and his companions similarly essay the older
group’s inventive approach to repertoire,
arrangements and tonal sonority. But you can’t
keep a barrelhouse player down and Barnhart
stomps and drives through Russian Lullaby
with impressive ferocity.
The only number that sounded
out of place – excellent though it is in its
own terms – is Angel Eyes. The rich
piano chording and lyric tenor add another
stylistic layer but the performance sounds
a little divorced from the surrounding material.
Otherwise this is another
enjoyable meeting of stylistically sympathetic
colleagues. The album is intelligently varied,
and swings with subtle ebullience.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
LAKE LACD 248 [72:12]
