Note: song performed in video above is not on album.
When saxophonist Nick Hempton makes a record, he wants his audience to experience that record the same way that club patrons who come see his band perform live does. That’s why he made a series of recordings taped live, one at a time every six weeks after-hours at NYC’s famed Small’s Club. And he released each track as soon as they were recorded, with no edits, no overdubs. Catch and Release was novel in how it dribbled out to the public but five years hence, the only thing that really matters is the high quality of those performances themselves.
Hempton is back to the good ol’ fashioned way of releasing an entire album out once with Night Owl, due to drop February 22, 2019. But he’s also sticking with the “live-to-tape” method of documenting his performances, and this time his ‘studio’ is the GB’s Juke Joint nightclub in New York. The twist in this particular plot is that Nick Hempton is heading up a combo specializing in that greasy, funky soul-jazz popularized by the likes of Lou Donaldson, Grant Green and Stanley Turrentine.
For this kind of music, you gotta have a B3 organ player, and that guy is Kyle Koehler. Preeminent soul-jazz guitarist Peter Bernstein fills that ‘Grant Green’ role, and Fukushi Tainaka, a veteran of bands led by Donaldson, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Melvin Rhyne, mans the drums. To round out that Jimmy McGriff-in-a-Queens-bar sound, this taping method produced a gritty, mono audio that completes the time travel back to 1965. I think they even managed to record the cigarette smoke.
And what better way to kick off this program than with a blues? “Night Owl” is such a number written by Hempton complete with a Gene Ammons-grade soul tenor sax. The mid-tempo buoyant original boogaloo “10th Street Turnaround” is so evocative of the 60’s organ jazz sound, you’d swear Nick Hempton was playing another cover from that era. And of this batch of tunes “Macao Mood” swings the hardest, something Hempton can authoritatively do in his sleep, but it’s Koehler who contributes a rousing, burning solo.
“After You’ve Gone” was made into a bebop standard by Charlie Parker in the mid 40’s and Nick Hempton stays faithful to that treatment even with the organ present, switching to Parker’s weapon of choice the alto sax for the occasion. Hempton is back on alto for a funky blues-based song he composed called “Corner Bistro.”
Hempton pours the sugar from his tenor on Frank Sinatra’s nocturnal ballad “I’m A Fool To Want You,” and Bernstein likewise plays sweet ‘n’ tender on his turn. “I Remember Milady’s” features Tainaka’s Latin groove, while “Listen Hard, Speak Easy” has a tough, contemporary sway.
The deep soul of ’60s organ jazz is at the heart of Nick Hempton latest venture. It’s fair to state that he nailed that feeling on Night Owl.
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