So Many Lovely Things

by Fritz Byers

In 1992, I was drawn to a show at the Regatta Bar in Cambridge featuring Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard on the front line. With his 1985 recording, The State of the Tenor, Joe had reestablished himself as a not-to-be-missed musician and one of the inarguable occupants of jazz’s vaunted tenor-saxophone. And Freddie, a wunderkind trumpeter who rose to heady prominence in the early 1960s, had reliably returned from his fusion digressions to produce a series of notable records in the mid-to late 80s. My friend John, whom I was visiting, saw an advertisement, and we got tickets for both shows.

The rhythm section had Christian McBride on bass and Joe Chambers at the drums, and the pianist Kenny Barron, whose name we knew but whom we’d not paid much attention to. Until that night. Solo after solo, Kenny shone, regardless of the tempo or the harmonic constructions the horns had built. It seems churlish to say so, but I recall thinking, I wish the horns would lay out. As we drove away, John said, “Kenny cut both guys on every tune.” He was right. Since then, Kenny has been my favorite living pianist.

This week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, we focus on a new release that captures Kenny in performance in 1995, a typically stunning demonstration of his taste, elegance, virtuosity, and invention.

So Many Lovely Things: Live in Brecon documents Kenny’s trio with the bassist Ray Drummond and the drummer Ben Riley, recorded on August 12, 1995, at the Brecon Jazz Festival in Wales. By then the group had been together the better part of a decade, and the familiarity and ease pervade the playing – in the way Ray anticipates a harmonic turn before Kenny has fully committed to it, in the way Ben shades a rhythm rather than simply keeping it.

One can’t reckon with Ben and what he brings to the bandstand without accounting for his time as Thelonious Monk’s drummer from 1962 to 1968. He and Kenny had first shared a stand in 1976, a week at the Village Vanguard with Ron Carter on bass. And they worked together in Sphere, the quartet devoted to Monk’s book. Of course, the history of the music is replete with folks who bonded over studying and eventually understanding the intricacies of Monk’s compositions. Kenny and Ben plainly did so.

The tape of the performance sat for nearly thirty years in the archive of the Spanish promoter Jordi Suñol, who had booked the Brecon date, until the producer Zev Feldman – justly known in these parts as the “Jazz Detective” – and Suñol brought it out this year on Elemental Music, with liner notes by the historian Ted Panken. It joins a run of European archival finds that have quietly reshaped our sense of musicians we thought we knew well, from Art Blakey and Bill Evans to Michel Petrucciani and Cecil Taylor.  

Ten tunes, mostly standards. fill the two discs, with two Monk pieces and two of Kenny’s own compositions folded in. Monk’s “Ask Me Now” gets a full trio reading, Ben shuffling behind Kenny in a way that makes clear how deeply he registered the tune’s loping beauty. Elsewhere the trio simply swings, and swings hard. “Up Jumped Spring,” a Freddie Hubbard composition Kenny has returned to across his whole career, moves with loose-limbed confidence, and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” is taken at a tempo that leaves Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stage markings in the dust. Our friend Kim Kleinman would want me to say that this was, by 1995, a working band in the fullest sense – Kenny’s trio of choice from the mid-1980s into the early 2000s – and the Brecon audience got the benefit of all those hours.

But don’t miss the two unaccompanied features – Monk’s “Shuffle Boil” and Kenny’s own “Silent Rain.”  I’ve heard Kenny perform the former tune several times, and it is invariably a showcase for the entirety of his gift: that famous touch, the harmonic imagination, and a patient melodic devotion that reflects his respect for the full history of jazz and its many lyrical beauties.

Ray died last year; Ben in 2017. Kenny, 83 this year, is still making peerless music. So I receive this welcome release less as an artifact than as a report from the middle of a career that hasn’t stopped, and hasn’t stopped causing wonder.