Search - Orrin Evans :: Easy Now

A spirited farewell

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 04/04/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This disc is Evans' tribute to his father, the playwright Don Evans. There's only one new composition (otherwise, Evans programs tunes by a number of his peers plus a few older tunes of his)--the title-track, which borrows heavily from Coltrane's ballads of the mid-1960s, & which was written for the funeral service. There's also a very unusual dirgelike reading of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father", a duo with JD Allen. But the rest of the album is much more upbeat, right from the opening "Captain Black", a hardhitting mashup of "Well You Needn't" & "Evidence" (with a bridge borrowing from "Confirmation")--& there's some more fizzy playing on John Ellis's "Bonus Round" & Evans' own "Don't Fall Off the LEJ". Allen only appears on the one track; for the rest it's Ralph Bowen (on alto & soprano, rather than his usual tenor--he sounds very good indeed on alto, maybe a little less interesting on soprano) plus a constantly changing rhythm section--Eric Revis and Mike Boone on bass, Rodney Green and Byron Landham on drums. Evans' chunky piano, full of Monk and Latin jazz as well as a smoother Herbie Hancock element, is excellent throughout, & I like the way that he messes with the head/solos/head template--for instance, by working into the tune sideways rather than stating the head directly at the start, or swerving at the end of a piece in a new direction. I'm puzzled about the truncation of "Dorm Life" (2 minutes of nice blues playing which fade in & out) & also the one-minute snippet of "Don't Fall Off the LEJ" at the end of the disc--I guess these are meant to further add to the work-in-progress feel of the disc, but they're a bit irritating & tantalizing. But in any case this is a strong album--nothing too outlandish on here, but it's got enough of an edge to it that it doesn't just sound like retro hard bop, though some of the tunes do have an "I've heard that before" feeling (aside from the Monk lift on "Captain Black", Bowen's "For DE" is a lookalike Wayne Shorter ballad)."