Mark Turner is a highly respected saxophonist with countless credits to his name as a leader and player in others’ ensembles. This is his first live release as a leader, and he chose to do it in the most storied jazz venue on the planet, the Village Vanguard. It’s a great place for Turner and his mates to be heard in peak form. A decade or so ago he was leading a different quartet, with David Virelles on piano, Ben Street on bass and the late great Paul Motian on drums. For several years now, his current quartet has been piano-less, with trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Jonathan Pinson.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard for listening to straight ahead jazz is to try to go through each song once for each instrument, and do your best to just listen to just that one instrument on each pass – sax, trumpet, bass and drums in the case of the Mark Turner Quartet. It’s almost impossible to do perfectly, but it’ll make a better listener of you, and teach you a lot about each instrument and each player. It’s certainly good advice for listening to something like this live date. Each of these players is so perfectly attuned to each piece of music and to each other that nearly every track is a master class in jazz playing. The deceptively simple “Unacceptable” is a good example, and it moves at a pace that makes such concentrated listening at least plausible.
Unless an ensemble is playing strictly one kind of jazz these days, the act of labeling their style has become less and less meaningful. That definitely applies to Turner & Co., who seamlessly call on many of the styles of the past half-century and makes them as one. The opening track “Return From The Stars” has strong elements of spiritual jazz, and it’s a good intro to the quartet and the performance. Nobody loves the sound of a tenor sax and a trumpet matching notes more than me, and that’s one of the specialties of this quartet. Turner seems to compose with the way his and Palmer’s horns blend specifically in mind, and they bring it to the fore on this lovely tune. Bassist Martin does strong work and Pinson’s brush work borders on magical. The third track “Bridgetown” is similar in this respect. Whenever the sax is playing, so too is the trumpet, in unison or harmony throughout the whole eight minutes; Martin plays a lengthy melodic bass solo with occasional vamping or interjections from the two horns, to sublime effect.
This is such a generous program at more than two hours that it’s impractical to review track by track. The two I just mentioned are among my favorites, as is the swaying waltz “Lincoln Heights.” Many of the tunes here are airings out of recorded tracks from Turner’s long career, including the closing tune, the swinging “Lennie Groove,” which dates to Turner’s second album In This World from 1998. Another of my favorite is a new piece, “1946,” a melodic bop on which Palmer conjures a Dizzy-esque solo. “It’s Not Alright With Me” starts with that rarest of things, a lengthy and interesting bass solo, with perfect accompaniment from drums; it then opens up into an engaging bop exercise on energetic solos from the horns.
This album is the first entry in Giant Step’s new series Modern Masters and New Horizons. The choice of Turner for the first release is significant – he’s definitely a modern master and ever open to new horizons. The series is being curated by trumpeter Palmer and drummer Nasheet Waits, and will feature original music by artists who have helped shape the modern jazz landscape along with those rising voices who are sure to do the same for the next generation. The Mark Turner Quartet’s Live at the Village Vanguard absolutely rewards close and repeated listening, as this veteran panel ably explores rhythm, harmony and groove, in one of the grooviest rooms on the planet.
(Giant Step, 2023)
