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DAN ROSE LAST NIGHT RIDE SYMBOL RID-CD-26 [58:00]

 

Dan Rose (guitar)

Recorded October 2017, Westbeth Artist Housing, NYC

Body and Soul

Darn That Dream

Ellington Medley
Say it Over and Over Again
Tenderly
What’s New
Sweet and Lovely
The Folks Who Live on the Hill
If I Loved You
Spring is Here
Moonlight in Vermont
Last Night When We Were Young
Medley: Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry/Detour Ahead/Dreamsville

Take an experienced, stylistically wide-ranging musician and add a portfolio of ballads from some of the masters of the American Songbook and beyond, and you have the kind of near-hour long album that Dan Rose has recorded. The guitarist has enriched many an ensemble over the years but here he stretches out solo, relaxing subtly with some favourite pieces and taking in Ellingtonia as well as Kern, Rodgers-Hammerstein-Hart, Arlen and numerous others.

This is an album of love songs. It’s never, though, inert or apologetically easy-going. Instead, there’s much of harmonic interest, not least in a new-minted version of Body and Soul in which Rose’s trademark lyricism, always affectionate and never cloying, is borne aloft on elegant lines. His sense of colour throughout is notable. He never uses these pieces as vehicles for astringent runs or virtuosic extremes though doubtless he could if he wanted to. Try the teasing introduction to his Ellington medley, for example, the buoyant and lightly sprung rendition ofThings Ain’t What They Used To Be, or the articulation clarity of Tenderly with its sublimated blues phraseology and its sense of inner dialogue fully intact.

The preference for a slow to mid-tempo ballads doesn’t in any way sound predictable and his use of single runs and chordal contrast in Sweet and Lovely shows an astute musical mind at work, varying attacks and expectations alike but always honouring the song. The rarefied lyricism of The Folks Who Live on the Hill has just enough tartness never to let the music merely simmer. His cool wit in the runs on Spring is Here as well as his tonal warmth, and the thoughtfulness with which he plays the final medley all attest to a true stylist in action, one whose timbral warmth allied to his substitutions and voicings ensure a personal connection between words, music and interpreter.

This thirteen track CD – with its two delightful medleys – offers superior balm for lovers of stylish and richly coloured interpretation and has been beautifully recorded.

Jonathan Woolf

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