Content area
Full Text
Before Sherman Irby took his trio into New York's Sear Sound last February, he spent a week polishing fresh material at the city's newest mainstream club, the Jazz Standard. There, before a handful of listeners, the Alabama-born alto player and his compatriots -- bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Clifford Barbaro -- dedicated themselves to the process of refinement. Along the way, they reached several peaks and tumbled down a few embankments. But one thing was obvious by the gig's Sunday-night conclusion: Their knowledge of the terrain was comprehensive.
The result is a blues-soaked disc called Big Mama's Biscuits (Blue Note), a record that boasts a kind of informality somewhat rare these days. Irby says he wanted the disc to reflect the looseness of his Southern upbringing. The album is teeming with the give and take that usually defines jazz. And the synergy between the musicians is utterly reflexive, as if there was no premeditation taking place. Some records of late - wait, better make that many records of late - present the aura of a board meeting. Irby's second outing is closer to a picnic.
With the leader's lines sauntering through the ballads and skipping around the uptempo stuff, Big Mama's Biscuits is colloquial bordering on cavalier. Committed to modesty, Irby has crafted his tunes to portray a kind of guilelessness that upends jazz's longstanding passion for elaboration. Pieces such as "Conversing With Cannon" and "Call to Order" aren't compositions as much as they are riffs surrounded by clever filigree. By the time the threesome has finished cavorting less turns out to be way more, and nonchalant is no longer a dirty word.
"This is an age when everybody's trying to show how much pen they have," says the 30-year-old Irby. "They want us to know how much they write, how hard they write, and how technical they write. OK, good, there's room for that. But I need something I can have a good time playing. I don't mind a head being tricky, so long as it doesn't sound like an obstacle course, you know? I want to have simple melodies to start with. Then we'll put the complexity into the solos, the interplay The idea is to not worry about the next shifting time...