COMPOSERS: Chris Ingham Quartet
LABELS: Downhome Records
CATALOGUE NO: DOHO 004
With so much 21st-century jazz to choose from, it’s refreshing when a disc turns up that harks back to the swinging sixties. In this case it’s the movie and TV music, plus other recordings, of pianist Dudley Moore. Chris Ingham’s quartet breezes in and out of Moore’s devilish score to Bedazzled, losing the cinematic flutes and strings but keeping the wittily economical piano melodies, such as in ‘Millionaire’ with its kitsch pattering bossa nova rhythms, in the melancholy main theme or in the graceful ‘Cornfield’, anchored by Rev Andrew J Brown’s resonant bass. There are plenty of other gems, including ‘Amalgam’, with its tumbling cascades of piano, and trumpeter Higgs brings a warm tone to TV theme Not Only… But Also. The quartet digs up ‘Strictly for the Birds’, Moore’s first single from 1961, a bluesy number with Moore’s original jokey falsetto replaced by muted trumpet. A worthy tribute to a British jazz great.
Neil McKim