I'm All for You

Artist: Joe Lovano
Label: Blue Note Records
Category: Music

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Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 724359195025
EAN: 0724359195025
ASIN: B0001Z36QE

Release Date: 2004-05-04

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Listmania:

Jazz Past Midnight - Late Night Essentials

Tracks:

I'm All For You
Don't Blame Me
Monk's Mood
The Summary (A Suite For
Stella By Starlight
I Waited For You
Like Someone In Love
Early Autumn
Countdown

Similar Items:

Joyous Encounter
Someday My Prince Will Come
Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
I Have the Room Above Her
From the Soul

Customer Reviews:

a joyous encounter.......2006-11-13

a collection of standards, ballads. anything i have to say about this recording, i said about a joyous encounter. treat yourself and buy them both.

It Feels Classic.......2006-04-29

I mean to say that the entire vibe I get from the album is classic - the art, sound, songs, musicians. Can't go wrong with Hank Jones. Joe's playing is so sublime, it makes me feel good. He's great live too. I don't know why people knock Paul Motian. His playing is very interesting and adds so much to the album. I love the way he uses the cymbals (subtle but slick - its hard to describe) as well as his sometimes off-beat sense of time. Check out his follow up album "Joyous Encounter."

Stirring the embers.......2006-02-10

No instrument is more synonymous with jazz than the tenor saxophone, due equally to the expressive capabilities of the horn and the legacy of great players who have been attracted to it. On the evidence of Downbeat Magazine readers' and critics' polls over the past decade, Joe Lovano would appear to be the favorite among contenders for the top spot among present-day tenor titans. Is he one of the giants? Perhaps, though one might be hard-pressed to make the case on the basis of this single session.

In the liner notes, Ira Gitler invokes Dexter Gordon as an authority on the subject of strong individual tenor voices. The comparison seems less than apt, especially if Gitler is suggesting Lovano is made of the same cloth. Dexter made each and every note a definitive choice during the course of constructing musical sermons delivered with such strong conviction that the extemporaneous circumstances of their creation is all the more to marvel at. His extended "Body and Soul" ("The Panther") rivals Coleman Hawkins' in emotional rhetoric and exceeds it in some of its inspired note choices based on alternate harmonies--tones that Dexter treats like daggers, carefully selecting each one, then sharpening and honing each before aiming it right at the listener's heart.

By contrast, Lovano's "Body and Soul" (retitled "I'm All for You") finds the player moving notes around on a chess table, experimenting with directions and possibilities, blurring some notes and abandoning others before making the move that counts, often to undeniable lyrical-poetic effect. He's definitely closer to Lester than to any other tenor player associated with this tune--from Byas to Stitt to Jaws to Trane. But his phrasing is more tentative and choppy, his sound is less open-throated, more squeezed and clipped than that of Lester or, for that matter, Getz. In fact, if I didn't know who the player was, I would guess Lee Konitz momentarily exchanging his alto for a tenor (listen to any of Lee's recordings of the tune).

This album may be the best introduction to the inimitable sound and approach of Joe Lovano (as a Sinatra-ophile, I found his tribute to Old Blue quite tepid). At this late, post-Bird, post-Trane time in American improvisatory music, sheer competence isn't enough, and genuine innovation is illusory. Possessing an individual voice is, in itself, no small achievement. And it doesn't hurt that the comparatively youthful, fifty-ish Lovano is supported by three of the current scene's reigning patriarchs in Mraz, Motian, and Hank Jones (for the math-inclined, a sexagenerian, a septagenerian, and an octogenarian). Not only do they lend sympathetic musical support but an incalculable sense of confirmation to this latest addition to a formidable musical heritage.

What modern jazz should be about.......2005-03-09

Jazz aficionados are wont to go on about the importance of innovation in the music - the "sound of surprise," as it were. And more often than not, the innovations most prized are those that go into the (now over-explored) realms of the weird and abstract. But there is another sort of creativity in jazz that is all too often ignored -- the search, not for the new, but for the true. And for an improvising artist, the most important truth is the discovery of an honest, unique voice, a sound that is distinctive, a sound that is the true expression of the musician's unique personality. Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano is one of the few modern players in jazz whose sound is immediately recognizable and wholly original. And for that matter, stunningly beautiful too.

Much of "I'm All for You" is a reflection on the romanticism of great tenor-men of yore. The album opens with the title track, an homage to the iconic Coleman Hawkins recording of Body and Soul. Later, Lovano offers a nod to Stan Getz with "Early Autumn," the song that made Getz a star with the Woody Herman band decades before Lovano took a chair in Herman's Thundering Herd. And though the album is devoted to ballads, Lovano closes the program with one of Coltrane's most supercharged burners, "Countdown." Lovano cuts the tempo by more than half, and though the tune still isn't a ballad per se, it is so leisurely by contrast to the original, that it fits in perfectly with the relaxed atmosphere of the disc.

At the keyboard is one of the last of the true greats of jazz, Hank Jones, whose playing combines the urbanity of Teddy Wilson with the modern jazz harmonies of Thelonious Monk. Jones may not be as nimble as he once was, but his playing is more wise and wistful than ever. Worth the price of admission is a moment in Jones' solo on "Like Someone in Love" when he slips into a gentle stride that, just in the left hand alone, paints an achingly beautiful picture of the last dancers on the floor.

Lovano has a quirky and elliptical lyricism. The melodies he creates are unpredictable, but no less melodic for their unexpected turns and jogs. And then there is his tone, gauzy and soft-edged like something from a half-remembered dream. Many notes fall away with that gentle sigh Ben Webster gave phrases when he was in a boudoir frame of mine. And yet, the music never flags or grows sleepy, as Lovano's playing is always alive with the anxious, searching quality of John Coltrane's best work.

So described, the virtues in Lovano's music might seem contradictory. But such apparent contradictions have often been the energy source for the best in jazz. The great musicians of jazz's golden age created music that was at the same time intellectually serious and unabashedly beautiful. Lovano has rediscovered that creative tension - no doubt in part because of his collaboration here with Jones, who never lost it. The record is a perfect balance of new and old, of the ascetic and the romantic. "I'm All for You" is what modern jazz can, and should, be all about.

Not His Best.......2004-12-29

Joe Lovano is usually at the top of his game but this is just too slow for one album. Most song if not all have no beat what so ever and just too dull.

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