Houston Person (right) with organist Ben Paterson (courtesy of HighNote Records)
This past September HighNote Records released Houston Person Live in Paris, featuring tenor saxophonist Person playing with a rhythm trio of Ben Paterson on a Hammond B-3 electric organ, Peter Bernstein on guitar, and Willie Jones III on drums. The title refers to a concert that was recorded at the La Villette Jazz Festival on September 8, 2019. Since most of Person’s albums are studio recordings, this is an opportunity to enjoy the spontaneity of a performance before an audience.
The album includes only one original Person composition, “Jean-Jaures Shuffle,” which is the last of the eight tracks. The hyphenation suggests that the title refers to the metro station in Paris, which was named after the pioneering socialist and antimilitarist Jean Jaurès, who was assassinated at a café on Rue Montmartre on July 31, 1914. Whether that was the station for the La Villette festival is left as an exercise for the reader! The music is too upbeat to reflect on its namesake’s assassination.
For this particular gig, Person seems more interested in honoring past masters, such as Lester Young, Johnny Griffin, and Benny Carter. He also has a way of taking over-trivialized movie music by Marvin Hamlisch (“The Way We Were”) and giving it an interpretation that has no trouble passing for sincerity. Furthermore, most of the tracks are long enough to provide opportunities for the rhythm players to exercise some of their own improvisational chops. (Person is far from the only player to “leap in” on the Young selection.)
I must confess that, over the course of my jazz listening experiences, I was more aware of Person’s name than I was of his performances. This new release allowed me to compensate for that gap in my perspective of jazz history. That said, if I am going to listen to more of his work, I shall probably want to consult his earlier recordings, made when his focus was on hard bop.
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