Roger Kellaway is Back with Straight-Ahead Jazz

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the beginning of last month, Roger Kellaway celebrated his 80th birthday. As a professional musician and alumnus of the New England Conservatory of Music, Kellaway has had his thumb in more pies than I could possibly enumerate; and he has managed to pull any number of tasty plums from many, if not most, of them. Nevertheless, “Remembering You,” the closing theme for All in the Family may have been his best shot at mass recognition.

However, those of us more interested in serious listening, rather than mass appeal, will probably gain more from listening to Kellaway’s latest album, released by IPO Recordings. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway consists of seven tracks recorded from performances at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles. Kellaway is back in a straight-ahead jazz groove behind a piano keyboard, where he leads a trio whose other members are Bruce Forman on guitar and Dan Lutz on bass. As of this writing, Amazon.com is only distributing this as an MP3 album; and Google has not been particularly helpful in finding a source that is selling the album in a physical medium.

From the very first track, Kellaway seizes listener attention by going back to the basics of Thelonious Monk. Too many modern jazz artists have used Monk’s “52nd Street Theme” as “sign-off” music, meaning that too many listeners know the music through only one motif. (Grumbling about Miles Davis may now commence!) Kellaway’s trio deconstructs and reconstructs the full thematic richness of this composition, charging through the building blocks of the piece at a breakneck pace, the perfect way to get listeners on board for the diversity of selections that will follows.

The Monk track is coupled with music by one of his long-time colleagues. Sonny Rollins is represented with his tune “Doxy.” However, the overall scope of the album also reaches back to the book for Duke Ellington’s band, including one of Billy Strayhorn’s most familiar compositions, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Caravan,” which Ellington wrote in partnership with Juan Tizol. There are also instrumental accounts of two “songbook” selections, “Night and Day” by Cole Porter and “Have You Met Miss Jones” by Richard Rodgers. Finally, there is one selection from the Dave Brubeck book, Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”

For my money listening gets most interesting when Kellaway and his colleagues are not afraid to exercise prolonged improvisation. “Have You Met Miss Jones” runs longer than ten minutes, while “Take the ‘A’ Train” exceeds the twelve-minute limit. However, even when durations are shorter, this album consistently explores how trio work can mine considerable inventiveness out of even the most familiar of tunes. The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway is definitely an album for any lister serious about the scope of jazz improvisation; and, however marketing may currently be trying to shape the very practices of listening, this is an album that deserves beginning-to-end listening attention for what it is, a document of a gig in Los Angeles that has now be preserved for posterity.