Recently there has been a small avalanche of live albums recorded in 2019, handy to fill the silent gap that was 2020. There were plenty to choose from, but I have a soft spot for Houston Person and couldn’t resist this. The American’s tenor saxophone style is straightforward but light on its feet, enabling him to negotiate neatly the tricky ground between jazz and R&B. His accompanying band of Hammond organ (Ben Paterson), guitar (Peter Bernstein) and drums (Willie Jones III) completes a classic format not often heard these days.
Half a minute into the opening number, a blues by Johnny Griffin called Sweet Sucker, and it’s clear that this is the authentic stuff. Following it comes a ballad, a bossa nova, a jazz standard, an R&B classic (Bobby Hebb’s Sunny) and so on. All four are excellent soloists, and all have moments when they shine, but it’s the easy brilliance with which they combine to create that unmistakable sound that’s most impressive. This, I think, was the last form of jazz to be truly popular, in the Saturday-night-out sense, and it certainly gets this Parisian audience happily warmed up.
