Bassist Brian McCree has been a pillar of the Boston music scene for decades,
performing with Bobby Hebb, Alan Dawson, Jackie Byard, Pharoah Sanders,
Rashied Ali, Ricky Ford, Joe Bonner, John Hicks, Ronnie Burrage,
Peter Laroca Sims, Jimmy Owens, Dave Liebman, Clifton Anderson,
Nancy Dussault, Makanda Ken McKintyre, Alvin Batiste and Warren Smith.
In 2003, McCree moved to the Big Island of Hawaii, but he has been returning
to his old home for gigs and recording sessions. Changes in the Wind is his first
album as a leader, and features McCree’s favorite partners playing a set of
originals and a couple of standards.
The music is swinging, deep and soulful. McCree has paid his dues on a
thousand bandstands and his playing features no frills or affectations.
With a commanding tone and time feel, he anchors and propels the band,
and when his turn to solo arrives, plays all the good notes.
The original compositions, written by four of the participants,
may remind you of the moment in jazz when the elegiac melodicism and
unlimited horizons of Coltrane re-entered the mainstream, reinvigorating
the way that musicians approached song forms and chord progressions.
Changes in the Wind features a legendary Boston-based talent, vocalist
Ron Murphy. Blessed with a bass voice somewhere between Billy Eckstine and
Barry White, Murphy sings the blues, gospel and jazz with fire and power,
and is here featured on the very familiar Nature Boy along with his
original, Cookie. Murphy truly deserves to be heard and recognized
beyond the Boston area.
Salim Washington contributes tenor saxophone, flute and oboe. His distinctive,
warm tenor sax sound is complemented by his use of oboe in place
of the more conventional soprano sax, adding a haunting, Eastern sound to two
tracks. Washington is a bandleader in his own right,including Love in Exile
(Accurate AC-5028), and has sidemanned with Pharoah Sanders, Kenny Garrett,
Reggie Workman, Rashied Ali, David Murray, Charles Tolliver and
many others. Washington has also recently published Clawing at the Limits of Cool:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, with co-author Farah Jasmine Griffin. |