My review of Randy Brecker Quintet, Live at Sweet Basil, today at All About Jazz.
Culled from direct-to-two-track digital recordings made on three of Randy Brecker's potent six-night 1988 run at New York City's Sweet Basil, and featuring a particularly top-drawer quintet of musical friends old and new, the original 1989 LP/CD release of Live at Sweet Basil (GNP Crescendo in North America, Sonet elsewhere) has long been out of print. That the original version featured seven broad-ranging Brecker compositions, performed with fresh vitality by this group for the very first time during this Sweet Basil run, has rendered its lack of availability a wrong all the more in need of righting. Furthermore, that the recording captured 27 year-olds Dave Kikoski (piano, synth) and Dieter Ilg (double bass) and 33 year-old drummer Joey Baron alongside the 43 year-old Brecker and, retrospectively perhaps most notably, 37 year-old saxophonist Bob Berg in particularly fine form makes MVD Visual's expanded DVD/CD reissue, Live at Sweet Basil 1988, all the more worthy of celebration.
By this time, Brecker was already a music industry veteran, and not just in the jazz world. Like his younger brother, the late saxophonist Michael Brecker = 5275, in addition to a sizeable jazz discography, the innovative virtuosic trumpeter had already amassed an impressive C.V. on mega-selling records by James Taylor, James Brown, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Steely Dan, amongst many others. It's no hyperbole to suggest that Randy Brecker may still not be a household name, but virtually anyone with access to a radio--especially in the '70s/'80s, but even today, on the multitude of "classic rock" stations--has heard him. And beyond his own work as a leader, and as co-leader of the Brecker Brothers with Michael, Brecker's early work with everyone from Horace Silver, Stanley Turrentine, Steve Khan and Grover Washington Jr. to Billy Cobham, Hubert Laws, Hal Galper and Charles Mingus, not to mention Frank Zappa, Dave Liebman and Mike Mainieri, only meant that he was, by the time of this gig, a player capable of literally anything and everything.
Berg, too, was an established player more specifically focused in the jazz world. Still, the breadth of his work, from his early days with Horace Silver, Billy Higgins, Sam Jones and Tom Harrell to the later pop/fusion of mid-'80s Miles Davis and his own emerging work as a leader on the Denon label, including 1988's particularly impressive Cycles, resulted in the saxophonist evolving into a particularly versatile player. Part of the same group of saxophonists that included, along with Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman, Berg is sometimes unfairly compared to Brecker's brother Michael, but his playing was always unmistakably his own, even if he shared a kind of post-John Coltrane = 5851 sensibility with his three saxophone siblings.
If there's another live recording, in fact, that helps position this quintet to some degree (albeit from a decade earlier and each possessing their own inimitable personalities), it would be Pendulum, the 1978 live recording by Liebman, Randy Brecker, Richie Beirach, Ron McClure and Al Foster. First released as a single LP on the short-lived Artist House imprint the same year but reissued, three decades later, with an additional 150 minutes on Mosaic Select as Pendulum Live at the Village Vanguard, that group focused more decidedly on jazz and Great American Songbookstandards but was, in its own way, imbued with a similar "take no prisoners" ferocity, whether firing on all cylinders or exercising greater delicacy.
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Originally Posted by Polypet
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