[Dixielandjazz] NY TIMES Review of Evan Christopher's "Delta Bound" on Arbors

[Steve Barbone]

Interesting review from Ben Ratliff. Lead the way, Evan.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


EVAN CHRISTOPHER ³Delta Bound² (Arbors) ARCD: 19325

Most jazz is specialized business, but what¹s considered traditional jazz ‹
usually meaning from Dixieland to swing ‹ is an even more pointed
subcategory. The clarinetist Evan Christopher has found his small but
committed audience there.

A resident of New Orleans from 1994 until Hurricane Katrina, and on the road
through the United States and Europe since, Mr. Christopher has made a few
stops in New York over the years. When he does, the members of the Sidney
Bechet Society know all about it, but many other potentially interested
listeners don¹t. 

That group, as this hugely likable record suggests, could be large. Mr.
Christopher, in his early 30s, has studied the early New Orleans
clarinetists closely, and has dedicated ³Delta Bound² to Lorenzo Tio Jr.,
who taught many of the best of them. (He died in 1933.) But don¹t stop
reading here. Mr. Christopher¹s playing is not a well-intentioned gloss on
an unreachable, long-ago time; you never think, ³The ¹20s, how quaint.²

The music is completely committed. You hear a genuine throb, a vibration;
you almost see the shapes of the notes expanding and contracting, becoming
blobby and then attenuated. Mr. Christopher is a careful player of a tricky
instrument, maximizing the range of sounds in its different registers:
pinched, throaty, woody, whispery. He makes close-encounter music.

On ³Delta Bound,² his best album yet, he is the focus of a fairly subdued
quartet, including the New York pianist Dick Hyman, also a lifelong student
of prewar jazz, and two of the best New Orleans jazz rhythm-section
musicians, the drummer Shannon Powell and the bassist Bill Huntington. The
songs take New Orleans techniques and rhythm as a starting point but spread
out stylistically, reflecting deep knowledge. They include ³Kiss Me Sweet,²
which Tio played with Armand Piron¹s dance band in the 1920s; ³Vieux Carré,²
a beautiful song written by Tony Parenti, another founding-father
clarinetist; a knockout-lovely version of Hoagy Carmichael¹s ³New Orleans²;
and a group of originals suggesting an Ellingtonian sort of pretty sadness.
BEN RATLIFF 


And this from the liner notes by Dr. Raeburn: Album Description:
³It¹s not every day that the jazz scene witnesses the arrival of an
instrumentalist who can combine an ambitiously fresh perspective with
respect for tradition as thoroughly and evenly as Evan Christopher does. He
understands that it¹s not the notes but the feeling behind them and the
human connections that result that matter most in New Orleans jazz. Imbuing
each performance with palpable emotional content is what Evan does best, yet
he is also a superb technician. He places himself within this tradition, and
it is appropriate that he should do so, because he is advancing it at a time
when some might assume that it is already extinct.² From the album notes by
Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn, the Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University