Shelly Manne & His Men - At the Blackhawk, Vol. 2

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Free Music Notes for At the Blackhawk, Vol. 2

Free Music Review: Definitive live jazz
Hit: 5 Stars

The band is a fine one. Richie Kamuca has never got the attention he deserved, but he is a tenor player fully the equal of Harold Land, Teddy Edwards or JR Monterose, his West Coast peers. His elegant lines & foggy Lestorian tone recall his East Coast contemporary Hank Mobley. Joe Gordon was one of the finest trumpeters of his generation (& died tragically young), with a charmingly tart tone which frequently has the quality of speech. The British ex-pat Victor Feldman is a notably subtle pianist (who was briefly in Miles Davis's band in the 1960s just before Herbie Hancock, & the association of the two pianists isn't coincidence, as Miles was at the time looking for more colouristic approaches to harmony than were to be found in bop piano). Monty Budwig & Shelly Manne make a rhythm section at once subtle & yet irresistably swinging. Manne was, perhaps rarely for a drummer of his generation, very much attuned to colour & pure sound rather than just dropping bombs. He's always worth listening to, whatever anyone else in the band is doing.

Classic jazz--recorded in 1959, it sums up the decade of jazz just before the wrenching innovations of the 1960s. Manne, of course, was already aware of the coming revolution, having played on one of Ornette Coleman's earliest recording dates....

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