Category: Reviews

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My regulars know I am a sucker for an organ trio, an even bigger sucker for a guitarist that can swing without venturing off that self indulgent cliff…Meet Ed Cherry and his first release on Posi-Tone which is appropriately titled “It’s All Good” featuring Byron Landham on drums ( Joey DeFrancesco ) and B3 dynamo Pat Bianchi who has played with everyone from Chuck Loeb to his own stellar recordings. 

Cherry is a name that sporadically popped up on numerous releases I’ve had the pleasure to check out and I say that because Ed Cherry is one of my musical easy buttons. Whatever, whenever, and where ever it’s all ways gonna be smoking and swing is king whenever Cherry is around.  What makes this release as close to perfect as you can get is that Cherry is obviously doubling as a musical sponge. Cherry started off at the world famous Berklee College of Music but soon after wound up playing with such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie and Jimmy Smith and you hear this in his sound. The swing of Dizzy, the keen sense of melody from Jimmy Smith and the deceptively subtle cool John Patton are all key elements that are part of the Cherry sound. The music is organic, a natural pulse and an all most hypnotic ebb and flow allow Cherry to do a riff on Duke Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood” and a killer version of the classic Kenny Burrell “Chitlins Con Carne.” Toss in Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” and one of the two Cherry originals “Mogadishu” and you have a release with tons of flavor and the perfect recipe for success. 

The trio is not an organ trio in the traditional sense since this is of course Cherry’s project but the trio is rounded off with Pat Bianchi who for this critic is Joey DeFrancesco First Blood Part Two. Speaking of Joey D. we have Byron Landham on drums who has logged some serious time gigging and recording with Joey D. and is one of the most under rated drummers around. A lyrical drummer that is locked and loaded with finese is the perfect compliment to Bianchi harmonic roots of what a trio such as this would and should sound like from the late 1960’s. 

It’s All Good is just that…All Good! Cherry and his single note lines are clean and well thought out. Every note matters and nothing is wasted. The zen jazz vibe of less is more makes for one of the better trio releases for the year. While this is not Ed Cherry’s debut as a leader it may well be his finest recorded work to date. An all star trio with a groove you can use.  

Simply put, if you don’t feel the swing or completely dig this release then you may be waiting on your autopsy report to come back. 

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Guitarist Ed Cherry is best known for his lengthy, decade-plus tenure with trumpet titan Dizzy Gillespie, but his work with another heavyweight of a different ilk—organist Big John Patton—is a more obvious influence on It’s All Good. Cherry played the important role of Patton’s guitar-playing foil during some of the legend’s ’90s comeback sessions and he acquired a deep understanding of the organ group dynamic through osmosis during this period.

Patton’s ’90s work dealt with some outlying ideals—courtesy of musicians like saxophone maverick John Zorn—blended with a more straightforward approach, but Cherry doesn’t flirt with far-reaching thoughts like his former employer. Instead, he puts his Grant Green-influenced guitar to good use on a program of relatively laid back material that emphasizes soul and groove in centrist fashion.

Cherry’s slick-cum-sizzling finger work is ever-impressive throughout this program of smartly reworked covers and originals. He brings a sly sound to “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” delivers a Brazilian-tinged take on “Blue In Green,” gives Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” a smoking, streamlined reading and turns Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” into a mid-tempo swinger. Elsewhere, Cherry hits a Wes Montgomery-like stride (“Something For Charlie”) and revels in the warm beauty of Duke Ellington (“In A Sentimental Mood”).

His comrades—organist Pat Bianchi and drummer Byron Landham—both prove to be well-suited for this session, as they’re willing to lead or follow and able to go wherever the moment takes them. Bianchi is capable of extreme subtlety, as demonstrated with his gentle backing on “In A Sentimental Mood,” but his skills don’t stop there. He can cook with the best of them (“Something For Charlie”) and he has a penchant for cut-to-the-core melodic delivery that’s exhibited during a pair of Wayne Shorter tunes (“Deluge” and “Edda”). Landham, who earned his organ group stripes with Joey DeFrancesco and several other high profile players, is the consummate groove maker here, delivering waltz time wonders (“Edda”), Brazilian beats (“Blue In Green”), über-slow funk (“Chitlins Con Carne”) and right-down-the-middle swing with equal skill. His solo trading, on display in several places, is crisp, classy and highly entertaining.

Cherry and company don’t distinguish themselves by doing anything bold or new on It’s All Good, but they make this a memorable outing through the sheer force of musicality and taste; the title doesn’t lie on this one.

http://cdhotlist.com

Ed Cherry
It’s All Good
Posi-Tone
PR8102

On this all-standards program, guitarist Ed Cherry leads a crack trio (including the great organist Pat Bianchi and drummer Byron Landham) through a nice variety of tunes both familiar (“You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “In a Sentimental Mood”) and less so (Duke Pearson’s “Christo Redentor,” Wayne Shorter’s “Deluge”). What you immediately notice about this album is how gentle and subdued the mood is–especially for an organ trio record. Normally this format leads to lots of funky shouting, but these guys are working in a much more restrained style and the result is truly lovely. It’s not to say that they don’t groove deep and swing hard–they do both. But they do so in a way that I can only characterize as “grown-up.” Very, very nice.

lucidculture.wordpress.com

Sweet Soulful B3 Grooves from Ed Cherry and Pat Bianchi

It’s unusual that a month goes by without a B3 album on this page at some point. For some people, funky organ grooves can be overkill; others (guess who) can’t get enough of them. Veteran guitarist Ed Cherry knows a little something about them, considering his association with the guy who might have been the greatest of all Hammond groovemeisters, Jimmy Smith. Cherry’s new album It’s All Good – recently out on Posi-Tone – might sound like a boast, but he backs it up, imaginatively and energetically reinventing a bunch of popular and familiar tunes and in the processs rediscovering their inner soul and blues roots. His accomplice on the B3 is Pat Bianchi, who has blinding speed and an aptitude for pyrotechnics; Cherry gives him a long leash, with predictably adrenalizing results. Drummer Byron Landham’s assignment is simply to keep things tight, which he does effortlessly. Needless to say, Wayne Shorter’s Edda and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage probably aren’t the first tunes that come to mind as potential material for organ trio, but this crew pulls them off.

The former is done as a jazz waltz, Cherry alternating between hammer-on chordal variations, southern soul mingling with bent-note runs and some bracingly spinning chromatics. The latter is a more traditional B3 swing tune with lots of suave Wes Montgomery-isms. They go fishing for the inner blues in You Don’t Know What Love Is, give In a Sentimental Mood a rather unsentimental nonchalance, then pick up the pace with Kenny Burrell’s Chitlins Con Carne, Landham digging in harder, Cherry building a sunbaked tension as Bianchi spirals and swells.

The most expansive track here, Duke Pearson’s Christo Redentor picks it up even further, Bianchi adding a chromatically-fueled burn, Cherry finally cutting loose with a rapidfire series of flurries out of the second chorus. Another Shorter tune, Deluge, alternates betwen laid-back urbanity and freewheeling soul-blues, while Bill Evans’ Blue in Green gets reinvented as a samba, with one of Bianchi’s wickedest solos.

There are also a couple of Cherry originals here. Mogadishu is jaunty and conversational; the brisk shuffle Something for Charlie (a Charles Earland homage, maybe?) gives the guitarist a platform for his most energetic work here. There’s also a version of Epistrophy that quickly trades in carnivalesque menace for a greasy groove. There’s plenty of terse, thoughtfully animated tunefulness here for fans of both purist guitar jazz and the mighty B3.