Description
Release Date: 2007
Label: Arbors Records
Track List
- Vieux Carre
- Rampart Street Ramble
- Creole Belles
- New Orleans
- Kiss Me Sweet
- La Ciudad Criolla
- The King Of Treme
- Desire
- Out Of There
- While We Danced At The Mardi Gras
- Sunday Mornings
- Delta Bound
Personnel
- Evan Christopher – clarinet
- Dick Hyman – Piano
- Bill Huntington – bass
- Shannon Powell – drums
Notes
Most jazz is specialized business, but what’s considered traditional jazz — usually meaning from Dixieland to swing — is an even more pointed subcategory. The clarinetist Evan Christopher has found his small but committed audience there.
A resident of New Orleans from 1994 until Hurricane Katrina, and on the road through the United States and Europe since, Mr. Christopher has made a few stops in New York over the years. When he does, the members of the Sidney Bechet Society know all about it, but many other potentially interested listeners don’t.
That group, as this hugely likable record suggests, could be large. Mr. Christopher, in his early 30s, has studied the early New Orleans clarinetists closely, and has dedicated ”Delta Bound” to Lorenzo Tio Jr., who taught many of the best of them. (He died in 1933.) But don’t stop reading here. Mr. Christopher’s playing is not a well-intentioned gloss on an unreachable, long-ago time; you never think, ”The ’20s, how quaint.”
The music is completely committed. You hear a genuine throb, a vibration; you almost see the shapes of the notes expanding and contracting, becoming blobby and then attenuated. Mr. Christopher is a careful player of a tricky instrument, maximizing the range of sounds in its different registers: pinched, throaty, woody, whispery. He makes close-encounter music.
