Jazz
JoJo Records · 11 September 2026
The closing track is called “To Michael Brecker”, it runs 7:23, and the trumpet sharing the melody with George Garzone’s tenor almost without ever letting go of it belongs to Randy Brecker, the brother of the saxophonist it’s written for. There’s no cadenza and no build. The two horns travel together from one end to the other, with Jeff “Tain” Watts opening the piece from the kit.
Garzone recorded at Van Gelder Studios with Luis Perdomo on piano, Santi Debriano on bass and Watts, and the album starts with the quintet taken apart: “Theme For Ernie” (6:31), by Fred Lacey, is tenor and piano alone, and Perdomo answers rather than accompanies, leaving the silence whole between phrases. The second track, “U-Jaama” (8:16), is Archie Shepp’s, and everybody’s in.
“Giant Steps” is the gamble: four minutes and seventeen seconds of Coltrane with tenor and drums alone, the melody withheld until the last bars. What you hear for most of the track is what Garzone pulls out from underneath it with his triadic chromatic approach. “It Will Happen To You” (6:46) is his own contrafact on Jimmy Van Heusen’s “It Could Happen To You”.
The two pieces Garzone wrote go at the end: “The Mingus That I Knew” (9:02), which remembers the night at the Village Vanguard when he asked Charles Mingus to put his cigar out without knowing who he was, and “To Michael Brecker”. The first of the two arrives at 43:26 of a 59:51 record, so three quarters of the running time goes by before the album reaches its own material. By the time it gets there, it’s over.
Two tracks had already appeared as singles: “Ripty Boom” on 29 May and “Theme for Ernie”, credited with Perdomo, on 28 August.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents