Torch Bearers, by Brian Lynch
Milwaukee-native Lynch has traveled various paths to the mountaintop of his art form.
The trumpeter-composer forged his own route up with his conceptually and musically loaded big band album The Omni-American Book Club which earned him his second Grammy Award. His first came from improvising a climb from the Latin side of the mountain, in collaboration with the great pianist Eddie Palmieri. Such efforts take courage and imagination, I know, as a now-disabled piano player and former mountain climber.
His third Grammy, last year, was as co-producer, helping loft the sultry, soaring wings of Samara Joy, perhaps the hottest jazz singer alive today.
Knowing a good thing, Lynch features Joy here on two original songs which speak aplenty about this recording’s radiance. It might be the most beguilingly beautiful album Lynch has ever made, and as good any of his, and that makes 26 as a leader! Annotator Ted Panken claims Torch “an inflection point – a manifesto affirming the vitality of hard-core jazz…”
Lynch and mates bear the torch for many bop giants including the one present, alto sax “guru” Charles McPherson, who is what Lynch would call an “unsung hero,” despite a quietly auspicious career, including 12 years with the titanic Charles Mingus.
The trumpeter has always possessed an uncommon gift for constructing melodious improv but outdoes himself on Torch Bearers. Time and again, his solos unfurl like bounteous wreaths of lyricism, strung with the enchanting logic of vintage storytelling. This is partly due to the winning material, mostly written by himself, and largely medium tempos. For example, on the snappy Jazz Messengers-like opener “Luck of the Draw,” his solo’s relaxed swinging effortlessly transcends the title’s risky implications, a rightness of shapely chord changing. McPherson displays similar gifts throughout, if a bit edgier style.
Even on the harder-swinging boppers “Luminescence,” “The Juggler” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Blue N’ Boogie,” the two hornists remain Birds in frolicsome mid-air play, always amazing to see. Finally, the pair alternates several solos each on the gorgeous extended reading of the one standard, “But Beautiful,” the album’s climax, which sounds like a slow sunset of many shadows, from a mountaintop.
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On her two songs (“Pursuit of a Dream” and “The Joy of Love”) Joy endows the latter’s bittersweet lyric with chocolatey suppleness recalling the magisterial Sarah Vaughan, by melting big intervals into pure azure. She thrills as few but Sassy could, though in a somewhat higher register.
Though their first recording together, Lynch has known his sax compadre (and sterling pianist Rob Schneiderman) since 1980, when he moved from Milwaukee to San Diego. Thus, the album’s sly, genial sagacity, as if these torch bearers light the way on an upward-bound mystery tour for you to solve in time, by listening.
Get Torch Bearers on Amazon here.
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