Between the Lines
Sonata for Swee’Pea
Woody ‘n’ Me
Covenant
The Long White Cloiud
Love in Silent Amber
Sonny’s Step
Mendocino Nights
America the Beautiful
Alan Broadbent and the NDR Big Band conducted by Jörg Achim Keller
Recorded April 2013, except Covenant (October 2013), NDR Studio 1, Hamburg [73:49]
All the nine tracks in this album are by Alan Broadbent with the exception of the title track which is a co-composition with Samuel Ward. All are
magnificent examples of his subtle art as tunesmith and arranger. With the NDR Big Band by his side there really is little that can go wrong.
He’s an experienced veteran of the big band scene, but it was 1972 when he last worked in one – that was the year he left Woody Herman. But fortunately
time has not effaced his skills in this larger medium and he knows how to write charts that are consistently involving, and full of the richest
contrapuntal refinement. Such is the case with Covenant where subtleties of piano playing and orchestration are paramount. The rhythmic basis is
deft and the music runs the dynamic gradients from reserved to overt brassy statements. You’ll seldom hear an orchestrator and arranger with a more
compelling ear for volume adjustments or a big band with greater skill in putting it into effect.
He shows his indebtedness to Strayhorn and Ellington in Sonata for Swee’Pea – and it’s always hard to tell apart which voicings are derived from
which man, so indivisible did they become. Broadbent also pays homage to Herman in Woody’n’Me in which elegy gives way to more loquacious
vivacity; it feels like a portrait, or a personal tone poem led by the distinctive tenor playing of Christof Lauer who shows here, and on The Long White Cloud, that he is a major soloist. In the latter song, which is a translation of the Maori name for New Zealand (Broadbent’s
homeland), he builds his solo with Getz-like purpose and intelligence allied to fine tonal qualities, and he brings the piece to life with great facility.
There’s a rich tapestry at work here, for sure. There is also wistfulness, as in Love in Silent Amber, written when Broadbent was only 23, and
dancing fervour – try Sonny’s Step, named for Sonny Clark. The lyrically terpsichorean sax solo is by Lutz Büchner. You’d expect Mendocino Nights, dedicated to his wife, to encode some romantic ethos and you’d find it in his piano introduction and postlude bookending rich
orchestral colours. And the open-air freedom he vests in America the Beautiful reflects the feelings he has for his adopted country, where after
some drum tattooing and other exegesis, the theme emerges at the end, burnished and triumphant. Rather like the whole album in fact – a Record of the Year
affair, without question.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
JAN MATTHIES 
