NYC Jazz Record: "Hudson City Suite"Review by George Kanzler
Hudson City Suite
Scott Healy Ensemble (Hudson City)
by George Kanzler
Healy has conjured up a captivating, amazingly varied and colorful range of sounds and moods with just a tentet here, showing that less can be more in jazz ensembles. —Longtime member of the Basic Cable Band on the Conan O’Brien late night TV show and keyboardist with an array of rock-pop musicians over the years, Scott Healy takes a surprising yet assured step into the realm of Duke Ellington, Gil Evans and thoroughly modern and personal jazz composing-arranging on Hudson City Suite.
Originally inspired by Ellington’s suites, the album is nine somewhat thematically related pieces by a tentet featuring four brass, three reeds and piano, bass and drums. Personnel vary and trumpeter Tim Hagans is added as a soloist on some tracks. Healy favors inventive, through-composed pieces rather than repeating themes and forms like AABA 32-bars. “Summit Avenue Conversation” may be described in the notes as “a pure, unadulterated old school burner in the tradition of Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford big bands”, but that’s selling it short. Before it picks up a head of hard-riffing steam, shout choruses and a swinging, swaggering tenor sax solo over roaring horns, it begins with a sly appropriation, in sax phrases over piano, of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Probably more ‘old school’ is “Franklin Steps”, reminiscent of Ellington’s many locomotive train pieces, with Kim Richmond’s alto sax channeling Johnny Hodges and bluesy piano
from the leader. Other Ellington flourishes include voicings nodding to “Mood Indigo” reed/brass mixing and generous use of brass mutes. Closing track “Prelude” is Ellingtonian in its sumptuous weaving of tonal colors in the horns.
There’s an impressionistic, almost cinematic scope to the suite – dedicated to a 19th Century community subsumed into modern day Jersey City – as Healy deploys a wide range of colors and timbres, making especially creative use of drummers Kendall Kay and Bill Wysaske. Two pieces lean alluringly toward art music: “Princess Tonga” has horns wafting over shifting, drifting rhythms exotically toward a final ensemble mélange featuring tandem clarinet and soprano sax while “Koko on the Boulevard” features a descending baritone sax-led line expanding into passages incorporating brief time shifts (4/4 to 3/4 to 6/8) and accelerating tempo. Healy has conjured up a captivating, amazingly varied and colorful range of sounds and moods with just a tentet here, showing that less can be more in jazz ensembles. Click for original article….