DON RENDELL — Live (as Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet) (review)

DON RENDELL — Live (as Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet) album cover Live album · 1969 · Post Bop Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
With that particularly ugly artwork, one might not be immediately-drawn to this Live album, but let t be known that it’s not a usual RCQ live gig that was put on wax, but a full-fledged album filled with new tracks. Recorded live in one evening session in a London studio in the spring of 69 in front of a small audience, mostly a press and arts crowd, but are they (RCQ) ever sparked-up for the event.

Opening on the impressive Garrick-penned On Track, which starts slowly before reaching bouts of breakneck-speed Gypsy-jazz passages and follows later on some outstanding jiving from all five concerned, you enter the album with the necessary enthusiasm that might have lacked at the view of the ugly record sleeve. A little more standard-y is Vignette, a gentle ballad that opens itself to both Carr’s muted trumpet and Rendell’s clarinet, soon followed by the excellent Pavane, where the successive moods are all-over the map, and Green’s bass quite enthralling, while Carr’s solo is certainly one of his best. According to the liner notes, Nimjam was played before Pavane, and it’ was a rather-standard-y piece that was given to them a few years back by Jeff Headley, but it’s a 100 mph piece that speeds too fast for its own good.

The second part of the set includes the 13-mins Garrick piece Voices, that starts out hauntingly enough with a delicious flute, but loses part of its charm in the bass-solo middle section, but gains much of it with Carr’s muffled trumpet solo and Garrick’s raga-piano going wild and Rendell’s flabbergasting flute. Difficult (if not impossible) to follow-up such an amazing epic jazz piece, so the Quintet moves on to a Ragtime-piano piece at first, but it’s all lost on this writer, still up in them vocal clouds of the previous piece.

Well, this Live-studio album is definitely another worthy RCQ album, maybe a tad superior to P3 (more outstanding tracks), but still a distant second to Dusk Fire. Well, the 2on2 BGO label reissue is definitely worth the acquisition (you won’t miss the massacred ugly artwork anyway), because it features a good 50% of really interesting and groundbreaking pieces. My ultimate fantasy would’ve been for their incredible Dusk Fire album being coupled to Live and P3’s most adventurous track, but let dreams remains dreams…
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