Ron Carter - Foursight: Stockholm, Vol. 1 (with Renee Rosnes, Jimmy Greene & Payton Crossley) (2019)

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Ron Carter - Foursight: Stockholm, Vol. 1 (with Renee Rosnes, Jimmy Greene & Payton Crossley) (2019)

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The strings vibrate gently. Accurate tone, unconditionally clear. And quietly. The longest ngers of jazz seem to dance weightlessly along the wooden bridge; yearning, ligree and elegant. No one else sounds like Ron Carter. His double bass often produces a crisp groove like an electric bass, yet it is always clearly de nable as the sound of a classical music instrument. Then the sound under the scorpion-like hands irresistibly swells. Payton Crossley gently caresses the cymbal, and Jimmy Green, the „new member“ on the tenor saxophone as well as pianist Renee Rosnes push the chorus onto the nely crocheted rhythm cover. “With us, nobody knows exactly what happens when,” Carter praised the Foursight Quartet‘s unique selling point. “This is precisely why every concert is a real challenge. We almost always play 35 to 40 minutes without a stop at the beginning. No breaks, just slight changes that show the beginning of a new song.

If we were a classical music band, it would be called a symphony with ve movements. This kind of thing only works with this band!”

In the present case, the phrases are called “Cominando”, a crackling hard bop structure that transports the spirit of the 1960s into the 21st century within a few bars, “Joshua”, his reminiscence to the old friend and partner Miles Davis, to whom he was available for many years as a moving spirit in his quintet and grounded and ordered the highying of the other soloists with subtle inserts, the dreamy “Little Waltz”, the cheerful “Seguaro” and a short recapitulation of “Cominando”. Carter sees himself as a monitor for the creative energies, a gentle, inconspicuous navigator whose pulse dictates the direction, but who would never destroy the imagination, the power of momentum through an ego attack.

Sometimes quietly astonished, sometimes full of enthusiasm and in any case willing, the audience at the Stockholm Jazz Club “Fasching” was guided to the goals that the gentleman on bass reached with Rosnes, Greene and Crossley on November 17, 2018. The quartet recalled the late pianist Geri Allen with the blues “Nearly”, and Chet Baker, the antipode of Miles Davis, with the grumpy “You And the Night And the Music”. Ron Carter also played alongside him. The question would have to be asked differently: With whom didn’t he play? “You must not be excessive during a live recording under any circumstances” warns the Lord of Whispering Sounds with a charming smile, whose bass sound can now be heard on 2221 recordings according to the entry in the Guinness Book of Records, and a few more since including this one, “It‘s like giving a private concert in a living room. Or we could be a chamber music ensemble that develops the power of a large orchestra without leaving a certain volume level. We have undoubtedly succeeded in doing so in Stockholm. I really love this CD! „ Both the insight from many decades in countless bands of different orientations as well as unprecedented joy speaks here, with which an old man like him can rise to new heights even in the autumn of his unprecedented career. Ron Carter has played in the most elegant concert halls and in the most desolate jazz clubs. The man, who nally dragged the double bass out of the dirty corner of the background instrument, knows that jazz can also be a struggle with ambient noises. Especially in clubs. Clattering glasses in row four, someone clearing his throat in row one, the squeaking of the toilet door somewhere in the back: the astonishingly young 82-year-old always meets these interventions of reality in sound art in a very relaxed manner. Including in the jampacked “Fasching”. If it gets too loud in the back, he plays a little quieter in the front until things somehow take care of themselves and get back to normal.

Patient, thoughtful and with all his natural authority, Ron Carter arranges things, creates relationships and declares the course of life with a few incisive tones. The magic of the evening is in reduction. Not one note too many, but instead let the breaks breathe. The music continues to roar in the listeners head, even if he no longer produces sounds and only moves his yearning agers playfully in the air.

All force slumbers right under the thin surface. It crackles continuously without ever really exploding. The longer “Stockholm Vol. 1” rotates in the player, the more forcefully the album exhales the timeless favours of a Cannonball Adderley live classic.

“In New York” or Stanley Turrentine‘s legendary “Up At Mintons” album, albeit with much better acoustics. No nostalgia, but instead the renaissance of good, noble, ne taste, because a bass player directs how things go. “Many of my colleagues still focus on their solos.

I concentrate on the music and on this very special moment. When I have reached it, I rejoice every time!” The zenith as a permanent state. (Reinhard Köchl May 2019 (translation by William Connors))

Ron Carter, double bass
Renee Rosnes, piano
Jimmy Greene, tenor saxophone
Payton Crossley, drums