“In The Moment” (Blue Parrot Studios) Grade: A
The Web site for Tucson drummer and jazz personality Artt Frank says that this album was recorded in 2004. Which it was, but only recently has Frank found the financial resources to get it distributed. Listening is like finding a window straight into a shadowy film noir nightclub where couples have adult conversations and smoke a lot of cigarettes.
Which is exactly the tone Frank took great pains to re-create in a small New England recording studio with a rented upright piano, where he was joined by five fellow travelers equally seduced by “the long, lost sound and personal intimacy” of little Manhattan jazz clubs in the late 1940s and early1950s.
Of the 12 tracks here, Frank had a hand in writing nine of them. Band mates Graham Bruce, trumpet, and Matt Criscuolo, sax, wrote the rest.
While the tempos vary from haunting ballads to blazing blurs of bop, Frank is proud that all are pure and true to bebop’s postwar ideals. There is no latter-day funk, fusion or atonal scream of discontent. These guys came to play, to swing with Frank’s steady embroidery of beats taken straight from a jazz drumming history he helped create.
To get a copy, go to www.arttfrank.com. Cost is $15.
style: bebop jazz