| The Abbey Road Sessions | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album by Ian Shaw | ||||
| Released | March 2011 | |||
| Recorded | 2010 | |||
| Genre | Vocal jazz | |||
| Length | 35:39 | |||
| Label | Splash Point Records | |||
| Producer | Neal Richardson | |||
| Ian Shaw chronology | ||||
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The Abbey Road Sessions is a 2011 studio album by Ian Shaw. [1]
Contents |
Over the years, I have seen Ian Shaw in many settings, from fronting a lush big-band-with-strings in a concert hall to late nights in a Soho basement, when someone should have stopped serving booze to that piano hours ago. Most commonly, though, it's been in a jazz club, just Mr. Shaw at the keyboard, along with the most expressive voice in British jazz, keeping the audience (be it at Ronnie Scott's, the Pizza Express, 606, The Vortex or any one of the scores of places he plays around the country each year) hanging on his every word.
Well, not only his every word, although some of his will certainly feature - Somewhere Towards Love, perhaps, or She's Loaded - but usually a Shaw show will involve a visit to Joni Mitchell's lyrics or Johnny Mercer's, Hoagy Carmichael's, Randy Newman's.. The Great American Songbook, I suppose, with a few welcome gatecrashers. His audiences hang on whoever's words they are, simply because Ian is one of the country's greatest interpreters of songs of any provenance, a singer who takes care to look for the truth in their lyrics. Time and again I heard have him announce something I thought had been wrecked by careless drivers – Cry me A River, perhaps, or Send in The Clowns - and wheel it out, the bodywork polished to a high gloss, showroom-new once more. Because, not only does that peerless voice bring something fresh to the material vocally, Ian's attention to the words (and he chooses songs where they have a considerable heft) bleeds meaning back into what, in lesser hands, can become a mere sequence of syllables.
You can hear that on this album, in the yearning, delicate Skylark, the heartbreaking chimera of Through With Love/Day Dream and the urgent push-pull of Get Out of Town. However, this record, as you can tell from its title, brings something else to the usual Ian Shaw experience. Recorded among the benign musical ghosts of the hallowed Studio Two at Abbey Road, Ian gathered a cracking cross-generational band, from the impossibly young trumpeter Miguel Gorodi through the only slightly less improbably youthtful guitarist David Preston - a long-time collaborator - to the Godfather of the British jazz bass, Peter Ind, playing on the eve of his 82nd birthday.
Peter also goes way back with Ian, to the days when he was a regular performer at Peter's pioneering Bass Clef club. Listen to that big, fat, springy bass on the opening of The Lady's In Love With You and tell me that sounds like a man in his ninth decade - apart from the fact that his inimitable sound is the direct result of a long history of gigging with the likes of Lennie Tristano, Zoom Sims, Buddy Rich and Mal Waldron. Not that his partner in the drum chair was overawed: the Cassavetes-cool Gene Calderazzo is an anchorman with a C.V that runs from Steve Lacy to Radiohead. Nothing fazes him because he's heard – and played – it all. Alto man Zhenya Strigalev and Irish pianist Phil Ware might not have quite the same well-padded backgrounds, but that's simply because they haven’t got the years under their belts yet: they are both serious faces on home turf (New York and Ireland respectively).
I was there for part of that day at Abbey Road, so I find it hard to dissociate listening to this album from the electricity and excitement that sparked in both the studio and the booth as Ian and the band parsed the entire jazz-song lexicon in just 13 tracks. It was a joy to watch them dismantle and re-build well-known tunes, making them afresh, and to witness how seven highly individual musicians can meld into a single tight unit over the course of few hours. So if you ask me for my favourite track, I’ll struggle. Well, with my arm up my back, it's got to be Joni's Be Cool. Or Stairway to the Stars. Although that arrangement of Stuck in the Middle.. hold on, I’ll just press ‘play’ again. And so will you. Liner notes by Robert Ryan.