Coming Soon!! Anybody Home?with George Garzone&Jerry Bergonzi Anybody Home? featuring George Garzone & Jerry Bergonzi, (AKA The Gargonz horns), Gabriel Guerrero, Piano, Luther Gray, Drums and Bruce Gertz, Bass Compositions by Bruce Gertz, Jerry Bergonzi and George Garzone Read Grammy Award winning writer, Bob Blumenthals liner notes. ANYBODY HOME? Bruce Gertz is a working musician in the truest sense of the word. He keeps busy with a variety of gigs as leader and sideman, but of equal importance is his insistence on applying himself to his art. There are no days off for this composer-bassist, who never allows music to get too far from his mind. Writing is a critical part of Gertz’s regimen, as the list of strong originals in his discography (and this is his tenth album as a stand-alone leader) indicates. “Back when I entered college as a geology student, the urge to write was as strong if not stronger than the urge to play,” he admits. “When I transferred to Berklee, I majored in composing and arranging, and my goal as a soloist has always been to sound compositional, which is what I hear in all of the great people. I try to write something every day, even if it’s just a lick, because that lick can develop into a full composition. It’s like a photographer who snaps a lot of pictures to get one good one. That’s the way I compose.” It is a sign of Gertz’s wisdom and sensitivity that the process does not stop there. “Nothing is more exciting than hearing good musicians play what you wrote,” he emphasizes,” so the best ideas get tested at jam sessions and subjected to other musicians’ input.” “Don’t Ask Me Why,” the infectious 5/4 opus that begins this disc, is an example of how things can work out. “The solo version on the second track is the real melody as I originally wrote it,” Gertz explains, “but the horns did something else with it, almost disguising the melody when their parts cross.” The finished product has a groove all its own, and as Gertz points out, the second solo bass track that concludes the album allows listeners to press the repeat function and create a “Don’t Ask Me Why” suite with unaccompanied intro and coda. “Ray’s Waltz” is another Gertz original worthy of special attention. It is a tribute to his father, who died two years ago. Anyone familiar with the bassist’s previous albums will be aware of his strong bond with his dad, and “88,” the opening track of Gertz’s 2012 disc Open Mind, is an earlier, up-tempo memorial. This waltz is darker, starker, with its own fresh form and sustained mood that inspire particularly passionate responses from the soloists. Gertz has a special knack for putting exceptional and exceptionally complementary solo voices together in his bands. He did it in his first recording quintet, where Jerry Bergonzi’s tenor and John Abercrombie’s guitar were paired in the front line; in his successor unit, with Ken Cervenka’s or Phil Grenadier’s trumpet in place of guitar; and in his cooperative Trio-Now, where Gertz shares writing duty with pianist Steve Hunt. He may have outdone himself on Anybody Home?, which brings together two of Gertz’s most venerable musical associates, Jerry Bergonzi and George Garzone. The Bergonzi-Gertz connection is well known and well documented, going back to the saxophonist’s ‘80s band Con Brio. As Gertz points out, however, “I met George Garzone in 1974, a few years before I met Jerry. George and I played together with Bill Frisell in a band called Ictus and with Mike Stern at the old Michael’s Pub, and back then I even subbed a few times in the Fringe. The idea of recording with George and Jerry together is something we’ve been talking about for years, at least as far back as the ‘90s when we were all in the double trio GarGonz.” The two tenors have only recorded together on one previous occasion, on a hard-to-find 1987 disc co-led by guitarist Tisziji Munoz and drummer Bob Moses. This present encounter should be warmly received by the pair’s many students and fans, and will no doubt prove instructive to those with a less complete knowledge of their respective work. Like far too many complete musicians, Bergonzi and Garzone are often typed – the former as the king of complex chord substitutions, the latter as an anything-goes champion of all-out freedom. If Anybody Home? has a point to make beyond the quality of its individual performances, it is that each can function as an equal on the other’s supposed home territory. Garzone has no hesitation in creatively making the changes on his own “Fours & Twos” (previously heard in a two-tenor version by the composer and Joe Lovano, and with blowing choruses based on the form of Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin”), Bergonzi’s “Ellwood” (dedicated to saxophonist Jeff Ellwood, and based on the changes of “I Hear a Rhapsody”) and the title track (Gertz’s variant on “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”). Bergonzi is equally convincing in the free-form “Exit Strategy;” and both are appropriately funky on “Thump & Growl,” the one piece Gertz specifically conceived with the two tenors in mind. There are moments when each enters into the other’s zone, so to keep things straight note that Bergonzi is heard on the right channel and takes the first tenor solo on all tracks except “Fours & Twos” and “Anybody Home?” The quintet is completed by two of Gertz’s more recent musical partners. Gabriel Guerrero is from Bogota, Columbia and studied with Bergonzi at New England Conservatory. Gertz met the pianist at a jam session, and has featured him on three previous albums. Guerrero is not heard on “Thump & Growl” and “Exit Strategy,” both of which were taped at the second of the disc’s two sessions. Luther Gray, who makes his first appearance on a Gertz session, is quickly becoming one of Boston’s busiest drummers, and plays every Monday with the Bergonzi quartet that shares the stage of the Lillypad in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Garzone’s longstanding collective The Fringe. Gertz taped his first date as a bandleader in 1991, and has shown a consistency that the vast majority of his better-known contemporaries have failed to match. Ask him about his evolution and he will note that he has become a “less selfish” musician over time, one more aware of his listeners, but this has not led him to dumb his music down or to momentarily pursue fashionable trends. As with his previous efforts, the music he creates here has the power to evoke feeling, thought and motion. He continues to work at it, and the fruit of his efforts is unmistakable every time he plays. Bob Blumenthal
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 18:54:53 +0000
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