I welcome any new release featuring pianist Kenny Barron, be it new or old. This generous live set from 1995 is no exception. Here Barron plays with his go-to trio of the era, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley, in the 475-seat Brycheiniog Theatre at the Brecon Jazz Festival in Wales, just another night on the second of two European tours for them that year.
You can drop the needle on any of the 10 tracks (and yes, it’s being released as a limited-edition 2-LP set as well as a 2-CD set, via digital download and streaming) and hear some of the best straight jazz ever laid down. These three veteran musicians knew each other like brothers and they knew every song in the book, but they never phone it in.
Swinging straight-ahead up-tempo and mid-tempo fare? It’s here in spades. The opener “Oh Look At Me Now,” an old Sinatra song that Barron learned while touring with Hank Jones swings elegantly. Freddie Hubbard’s “Up Jumped Spring” flows and swings with daring invention including a bit of Barron mimicking Hubbard’s sixteenth-note upward runs. The standard “Time Was” bops along like the stream of time singing over a creekbed of polished stones. “The Surrey With The Fringe On Top” avoids the cornfields altogether but still swings and sways along happily, and it sports one of those middle solo sections where, as one longtime bandmate put it, he kicks into “warp speed from Star Wars gear.” And the set closes with the loose-limbed “Canadian Sunset” with emphatic fills from Riley. Oh and don’t miss Barron’s jaw-dropping solo rendition of Thelonious Monk’s hot stride “Shuffle Boil.”
On the more romantic and tender side, there’s Monk’s lovely ballad “Ask Me Now,” the sturdy standard “The Very Thought Of You,” the very definition of a blue tear-jerker. And I absolutely love the playfully reverent “Nikara’s Song” dedicated to Barron’s then young daughter. I just love Kenny Barron’s approach to playing jazz and playing the piano, and I think it’s probably because of what Ray Drummond once said: “He doesn’t just play changes, but redeploys the melody in a very complex way.”
So Many Lovely Things comes to us via Zev Feldman’s Elemental Music, produced by him and Spanish promoter Jordi Suñol from original recordings (by festival director Jed Williams) in the Jordi Suñol Archives. Lots of documentation in the liner notes and a valuable essay by jazz writer and programmer Ted Panken.
(Elemental Music, 2026)
