Everything old is not quite new again on Joey DeFrancesco’s forthcoming Wonderful! Wonderful!, though I found myself disarmed nevertheless by this album’s old-school charms. It’s no small thrill, for instance, to hear the title tune (a moony old Johnny Mathis ballad) transformed into this episodic, organ-jazz burner.
At the same time, though, you’ll also immediately hear echoes of everything that transformed Jimmy Smith and Captain Jack McDuff into legends for the ages, even the odd whiff of melodrama. This in itself is no knock, so much as part and parcel of the classic organ sound — and, to be completely honest, probably perfect for this particular material.
But it also underscores the career struggle for DeFrancesco, as he tries to fashion something brand new out of a sound that is so deeply rooted in another time.
This vague sense of the familiar continues as Francesco moves into subsequent takes on Benny Golson’s “Five Spot After Dark” and on “Wagon Wheels,” which was transformed into a jazz standard of sorts on Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West recording. These late 1950s-era gems benefit immeasurably from the steady yet dynamic presence of Cobb, among the last living connections to the period, but there’s precious little new ground being plowed here. Even Coryell has left aside the Hendrix-inspired fusion sounds with which he made his own legend, choosing instead to do the expected channeling of Wes Montgomery. Fans of Cobb’s seminal work as drummer on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, meanwhile, are pointed to the expected modal sideroads of Coryell’s original “Joey D.”
[SOMETHING ELSE! INTERVIEW: Jimmy Cobb remembers his off-hand decision to join Miles Davis just before ‘Kind of Blue,’ and unforgettable times with Dinah Washington and Wes Montgomery.]
Interestingly, however, a lugubrious take on “Solitude” — this shopworn Duke Ellington songbook item that might have potholed any previous momentum anyway — instead finds DeFrancesco driving the track even further into that dark night. Their efforts similarly pay off on Victor Young’s “Love Letters,” which is seasoned with a witty new sense of ardor. “JBJ Blues” then cranks things up for one final run, with DeFrancesco and Coryell doing their best to outrun the ever-fleet, cymbal-tinging Cobb, and never quite catching him.
They sound, bless ’em, like they are having the time of their lives.
DeFrancesco stays completely, utterly, actually maybe too consistently in the pocket throughout — even when he switches briefly to trumpet on “Old Folks,” again echoing Davis (with whom he toured during the late 1980s in support of Amandla) with his use of the mute. As such, Wonderful! Wonderful! doesn’t produce a whole lot of surprises.
Yet, the album somehow doesn’t disappoint either, if only because it etches such a straight line back to some muscle-memory delights of another era — an era now definitively past. They may not be redrawing the past here, but sometimes homage (coupled with a serious will to fun) is enough.
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