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Charles Tolliver Big Band

With Love

Blue Note/Mosaic 0946 3 69315 2 4

This album, featuring a somewhat neglected figure from Blue Note's heyday, trumpeter Charles Tolliver, nails its colours to the mast from the off, with a rip-snorting, brawling opener, 'Rejoicin'', full of shrieking brass and tumultuous soloing.

Thereafter, the temperature seldom drops below boiling point, even on a Tolliver arrangement of ''Round Midnight' which, taken at times at a tempo approximately three times as fast as is customary, unexpectedly reveals itself as possessed of a wonderfully swinging chord sequence perfectly adaptable to the hurtling version given of it here.

There are quieter moments, notably in 'Mournin' Variations', originally written (in 1972) as an orchestral suite for Max Roach, but overall, this is a band that idles in joyous exuberance mode and swiftly goes up through the gears from there.

Tolliver himself is heavily (and tellingly) featured as a bright, blowsy soloist, but pianists Stanley Cowell and Robert Glasper also shine, as do saxophonists Craig Handy and Bill Saxton.

There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of charm and subtlety about the big-band work of, say, Maria Schneider, with its pastel colours and textural delicacy, but occasionally it's great to hear a unit at full throttle, roaring and being generally rumbustious, and Tolliver's unit is a perfect example of such a band.