Jeremy Pelt - #Jiveculture

Septuagenarian bassist Ron Carter is now a Guinness World Record holder for most session credits on his instrument, surpassing the previous honoree Milt Hinton in September of last year. Carter’s ubiquity has been long-standing across a nearly sixty-year career and as such his presence on trumpeter Jeremy Pelt’s seventh venture for the HighNote imprint hardly warrants surprise. What does merit mention is how well the veteran player meshes with Pelt’s specific designs. Excepting its slightly suspect title, #Jiveculture delivers an experience opposite the intimations of its social media-savvy shorthand. Pelt’s intentions apparently centered on an earlier, positive-leaning vernacular of the term. Pelt parses the album into two parts, each comprises four pieces. Deviating from some of his earlier efforts, the band on hand is lean and largely acoustic with regular pianist Danny Grissett switching to Fender Rhodes only on the Pelt-penned, Janus-faced “Rhapsody” late in the program. Percussionist Lisette Santiago guests on the same track, but otherwise the studio date relies on a quartet configuration with prolific drummer Billy Drummond completing the roster. The instrumentation echoes Herbie Hancock’s classic Empyrean Isles on Blue Note, which coincidentally Carter also handled bass duties on a half-century ago. The opener “Baswald’s Place” clears the band’s palate, making pithy introductions of the players and a swift colloquy between the leader and Drummond within the terse span of three minutes and change. Carter’s “Einbahnstrasse” communicates his flirtations with chamber forms and offers up the first of several bass solos that show the skill built from a sessionography that numbers in the thousands. Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing” and the Dave Grusin-scripted ballad “A Love Like Ours” each celebrate the easy equilibrium between Pelt and the rhythm section and feature divergent statements from the former that revel in the supple and sonorous properties of his horn. Four Pelt compositions comprise the album’s second half starting with the sliding, sequenced challenges of “The Haunting”, which commences as melodic feature for Drummond sans band. Working over a destabilized waltz tempo Pelt proffers another improvisation, this time almost plangent in its urgency. It’s emotive territory he also mines effectively on the fleet-paced closer “Desire”, which accesses stylistic acreage closest to the aforementioned Hancock album. “Akua” recalibrates the ensemble to a transparent, delicate vamp structure with Carter once again serving as viscous, but elastic glue in connecting the component parts. Questions as to whether the Pelt/Carter partnership will carry over to future sessions are left hanging, but based on the sturdy results herein the value in such a reconvening seems a foregone conclusio Record Label: High Note Style: Jazz