RICHIE COLE - plays ballads and love songs
Richie Cole Presents RCP 002
Richie Cole (alto sax) Eric Susoeff (guitar) Mark Perna (acoustic and electric bass) Vince Taglieri (drums)
Recorded at Heid Studios, Aspinwall, PA September 2015.
Like Phil Woods, to whom he is heavily indebted, Richie Cole has kept faith with the be-bop idiom established by Charlie Parker and breathed new life into it through the sheer energy and vivacity of his playing. Starting out with the Buddy Rich big band in the late sixties he quickly established a headlong but highly articulate style which he eventually branded as `Alto Madness` for a series of bands he recorded for Muse Records in the seventies and eighties. This fine body of work is hard to obtain these days and what is available can only be had for premium prices so it is especially welcome that he is back in the recording studio putting out discs under his own RCP imprint.
The `Alto Madness` moniker lingers on but as he approaches his seventieth birthday his style has matured and softened, just a little, with the admixture of some Johnny Hodges lyricism. This quality is very evident here in what we are told is his first purely ballad album, the unintended consequence of a scheduling cock-up that prevented him recording a very different set with his Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra. The studio having been already booked the remaining quartet decided to lay down some tracks on the fly of which eight turned out to be ballads sealing the deal as to the album’s overall temper.
Apart from `Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered` it is a fairly un-hackneyed playlist including such oddities as `The Internationale`, the original national anthem of the Soviet Union, to which Cole mischievously applies a cheeky coda based on `America the Beautiful` (a prescient anticipation of Trump’s electoral victory?),`Sunday Kind of Love`, an old Louis Prima number which survived various doo-wop interpretations the essence of which Cole captures to perfection by emulating the falsetto leaps of a typical vocal group with some sexy vibrato. There is an `Alfie`, an `Emily and a `Sarah` suggesting that a theme was trying to assert itself and some tunes that we don’t readily associate with the jazz standards repertoire. Of these a take on the Johnny Mathis hit `Chances Are` and Keely Smith’s lounge classic, `Its Magic` are standouts in a programme that offers manifold delights for those who like to luxuriate in jazz that in turns relaxes and stimulates the senses. The support Cole receives from his quartet partners is nothing short of immaculate, as is the recording quality achieved, and Susoeff’s warm and pure toned guitar provides deft harmonic backing plus chorus after chorus of sustained melodic invention producing a delightful contrast between the solo voices.
So we can be grateful that an instance of Sod’s Law turned out so well providing Cole with the opportunity to take time out from his trademark madness and fulfil a hitherto unrealised ambition to produce a ballad album. Having taken the plunge with such a satisfying outcome, we can only hope that it won’t be long before he gives us an encore.
Reviewed by Euan Dixon
Richie Cole Presents RCP 002
Richie Cole (alto sax) Eric Susoeff (guitar) Mark Perna (acoustic and electric bass) Vince Taglieri (drums)
Recorded at Heid Studios, Aspinwall, PA September 2015.
Like Phil Woods, to whom he is heavily indebted, Richie Cole has kept faith with the be-bop idiom established by Charlie Parker and breathed new life into it through the sheer energy and vivacity of his playing. Starting out with the Buddy Rich big band in the late sixties he quickly established a headlong but highly articulate style which he eventually branded as `Alto Madness` for a series of bands he recorded for Muse Records in the seventies and eighties. This fine body of work is hard to obtain these days and what is available can only be had for premium prices so it is especially welcome that he is back in the recording studio putting out discs under his own RCP imprint.
The `Alto Madness` moniker lingers on but as he approaches his seventieth birthday his style has matured and softened, just a little, with the admixture of some Johnny Hodges lyricism. This quality is very evident here in what we are told is his first purely ballad album, the unintended consequence of a scheduling cock-up that prevented him recording a very different set with his Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra. The studio having been already booked the remaining quartet decided to lay down some tracks on the fly of which eight turned out to be ballads sealing the deal as to the album’s overall temper.
Apart from `Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered` it is a fairly un-hackneyed playlist including such oddities as `The Internationale`, the original national anthem of the Soviet Union, to which Cole mischievously applies a cheeky coda based on `America the Beautiful` (a prescient anticipation of Trump’s electoral victory?),`Sunday Kind of Love`, an old Louis Prima number which survived various doo-wop interpretations the essence of which Cole captures to perfection by emulating the falsetto leaps of a typical vocal group with some sexy vibrato. There is an `Alfie`, an `Emily and a `Sarah` suggesting that a theme was trying to assert itself and some tunes that we don’t readily associate with the jazz standards repertoire. Of these a take on the Johnny Mathis hit `Chances Are` and Keely Smith’s lounge classic, `Its Magic` are standouts in a programme that offers manifold delights for those who like to luxuriate in jazz that in turns relaxes and stimulates the senses. The support Cole receives from his quartet partners is nothing short of immaculate, as is the recording quality achieved, and Susoeff’s warm and pure toned guitar provides deft harmonic backing plus chorus after chorus of sustained melodic invention producing a delightful contrast between the solo voices.
So we can be grateful that an instance of Sod’s Law turned out so well providing Cole with the opportunity to take time out from his trademark madness and fulfil a hitherto unrealised ambition to produce a ballad album. Having taken the plunge with such a satisfying outcome, we can only hope that it won’t be long before he gives us an encore.
Reviewed by Euan Dixon
