Octave Records’ latest release is Jazz Classics: 1960s from pianist Tom Amend. It’s a follow up to Jazz Classics: 1950s and features Amend and his quintet taking a deep dive into jazz classics and pop standards like “The Girl From Ipanema,” “My Favorite Things,” Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” “The Look of Love” and others.
Jazz Classics: 1960s features Tom Amend on piano and Hammond B3 organ, along with Nate Miller on trumpet, Taylor Clay playing tenor sax, Gonzalo Teppa on bass, and Braxton Kahn at the drums. The quintet imparts a depth to songs they’re intimately familiar with, and like any great group of jazz players, they honor the material while offering a fresh perspective. The sound matches the music perfectly, with remarkable clarity, dynamic shadings, and presence. Jazz Classics: 1960s is recorded with a warmth that hearkens back to the iconic sound of 1960s recordings, yet with modern-day spaciousness, detail and refinement.
The Pure DSD 256 recording captures the rich textures of each instrument, utilizing a Gefell UM 930 and AKG C214 condenser mics, along with Beyer Dynamic mics for the snare and kick drum. Jazz Classics: 1960s was recorded with Octave Records’ custom-built Pyramix-based 32-channel DSD 256 setup. The album was recorded, mixed and produced by Paul McGowan, with Terri McGowan and Jessica Carson assisting in the recording and production duties, and mastered by Gus Skinas.
Jazz Classics: 1960s leads off with Lee Morgan’s up-tempo “Something Cute,” and right away listeners know they’ll be treated to some classic jazz blowing and incredible sound, from the bite of the trumpet to the body and presence of the sax, piano and rhythm section. The main melody is stated by trumpeter Nate Miller and saxophonist Taylor Clay before the players launch into intense improvisations. Next up is the all-time favorite “The Girl From Ipanema,” and the quintet rides into a flowing samba feel, with Miller, Amend and Clay taking turns on expanding the song with confident musical statements. “Jean de Fleur,” originally recorded by guitarist Grant Green, pays tribute to the original with its unstoppable groove, powered by the bass and drums of Gonzalo Teppa and Braxton Kahn.
Tom Amend at the Hammond organ.
Next is a beautiful rendition of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and the instrumental textures are sumptuous. The band then shifts into the walking-bass swing of Duke Pearson’s “New Girl,” absolutely nailing the classic jazz feel. Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” opens with a bowed bass and sparse piano chords before the trumpet and sax state the main theme, and Miller and Clay take incisive solo turns.
It would be impossible to play “My Favorite Things” without tipping the hat to John Coltrane’s legendary version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, and the band captures the spirit of the sax master while adding their own distinctive musical statements. Jazz Classics: 1960s rounds out the set with Wayne Shorter’s pensive ballad, “Fall,” a roaring, fast-paced version of Joe Henderson’s “A Shade of Jade,” and a relaxed rendition of “The Look of Love,” featuring tasteful muted trumpet playing from Nate Miller, and Tom Amend weaving his piano and organ lines in and out of the musical mix.
Jazz Classics: 1960s features Octave’s premium gold disc formulation, and the disc is playable on any SACD, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray player. It also has a high-resolution DSD layer that is accessible by using any SACD player or a PS Audio SACD transport. In addition, the master DSD and PCM files are available for purchase and download, including DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64, and DSDDirect Mastered 352.8 kHz/24-bit, 176.2 kHz/24-bit, 88.2 kHz/24-bit, and 44.1 kHz/24-bit PCM.
I connected with Tom to talk about the making of Jazz Classics: 1960s.
Frank Doris: What made you decide to do an album of 1960s songs this time?
Tom Amend: The folks at Octave asked me to!
FD: I imagine you played everything live? Except for the organ overdub on “The Look of Love.”
TA: Yep.
FD: Did you write out the arrangements and play from charts or just wing it?
TA: A lot of those tunes, we all know and play in different contexts, and the ones that are a little newer, I might've written out just a lead sheet and we talked about how we were going to do it the day of the session. But yeah, pretty standard jazz protocol.
FD: Are the guys on the album your regular players, or I suppose you could call them the regular Octave Records players?
TA: I know those guys from a lot of different bands in the Colorado music scene. I’m grateful for the great musicianship around here.
FD: Did you do everything in one take or you did a few takes and pick the best one
TA: One or two takes probably. It was a while ago, so forgive me for my memory being a little foggy. A lot of things have happened since then!
FD: Well, it’s good that you're working. What made you pick the players and decide it was going to be this particular configuration of musicians? The trumpet and tenor sax really give it that classic late 1950s, early 1960s jazz feel.
TA: The trumpet and tenor is such an iconic pairing. There are so many great examples of that in our favorite jazz records over the years. These two musicians, Nate (trumpet) and Taylor (tenor sax), are two of my favorite people to play with around town, and I hadn't done a whole lot of playing with the two of them together, so I thought it would be fun to get them both on this record, in this band.
FD: Well, you can hear the interplay between the musicians. I really like the combination of structured sections, and just going for it. You can’t play “My Favorite Things” without acknowledging John Coltrane. But you guys added your own flavor to it. Was your version spontaneous, or did you say, yeah, we've got to tip the hat to Coltrane, but we're going to do our own thing?
TA: We probably didn't [think] too much about any of that! The weight of playing this kind of music is all pretty understood for us. Paul [McGowan] had given us a list of recommended songs, [which included] some of the other ones on the album. It's a good challenge to play some of those really iconic tunes.
FD: Let me guess, Paul wanted you to do “The Look of Love.”
TA: Yep, the same deal.
FD: In a way, that’s even more challenging, because, how many people have covered that song? Well, at least you're not a female vocalist, because every female vocalist on Earth has to live up to Dusty Springfield, especially in the audiophile world (where her recording of “The Look of Love” from the original Casino Royale soundtrack is considered one of the greatest vocal recordings ever). It’s a real challenge to try to add your own thing to songs like that, which are just etched in people's brains. But I think you did it.
TA: It’s kind of a fine line to walk when you're playing other people's music. We have to decide what we want to take from and pay homage to in those original recordings, and how to also just try and be ourselves, because that's really what I value the most in any music.
I've done the tone-for-tone and note-for-note approach in the cover band world, and the older I get, the less I want to do that, because that's not why I got into music. I got into music to express and try and be myself. The beautiful thing about jazz music, especially, is that there's room for that when you're playing other peoples’ music.
FD: It’s incredibly difficult to play classical music, but for me, spontaneous improvisation is maybe the most difficult art form of all, and you have to really work at it until you get to the point where you can express yourself freely without sounding stilted or like you’re copying anybody else. When I hear you play, you have a distinct style. I really get a sense of it just being music coming out of you.
TA: Oh man. That’s the best compliment you can give me. That's what I'm going for. All of the folks on this record…that's a priority that we have in our music, to try to just be ourselves.
FD: I asked you this in our last interview, but it’s been a while, and for the benefit of newer readers, who are some of your influences and who do you like today?
TA: Eddie Van Halen. I'm big into him right now.
John Coltrane. Everybody, man. I really have spent a lot of my life performing and learning how to play jazz from the tradition of straight-ahead swinging jazz. So, all of those greats. In terms of pianists, I love {Thelonious] Monk, Oscar Peterson, Herbie [Hancock], and Chick Corea. But then I love hip-hop and A Tribe Called Quest, and all the classic rock bands. Steely Dan, Donald Fagen. I don't just play jazz on a night to night basis. I play a lot of other music too, funk, a lot of R&B. I'm in a country band, so I love Hank Williams, George Jones. I'm always learning different kinds of music too, and try and put that into the music. I don't want to sound like Chick. I don't want to sound like Herbie, as much as I love to listen to those guys and as much as I've stolen from them.
FD: We all steal from other musicians. I think it’s OK.
TA: It's part of the learning process. And to me, that process is just learning [the] language. Then you have a relatable language that you can speak with other musicians who know and understand the same language.
FD: I'm sure you feel that ultimately, you take everything you've learned, and when you're up there playing, you're not thinking about any of it. You're just playing what you feel in the moment.
TA: It obviously takes a long time to get to that point in your development, but I've been playing for most of my life. I'm at that point where a lot of the core influences have been assimilated, and I'm trying to just let stuff come out and not overthink too much. What I'm thinking about when I'm playing or improvising is, what's going on around me. How do I relate to the other musicians or the people in the room at the gig? I am playing for them and not for myself.
FD: Do you have any particular favorites or interesting moments on the Jazz Classics: 1960s album?
TA: I had a lot of fun playing “Fall.” That's a really beautiful Wayne Shorter tune. Wayne is one of those guys that I keep coming back to and never get tired of playing his music. His tunes have nice harmonic challenges in them and so many colors, and they encourage you to be open in your approach, in your improvising. It’s kind of same with Joe Henderson, and the tune “A Shade of Jade” [on the album]. He wrote so many great tunes that we all love to play. On a lot of those [kinds of songs], once you know how to deal with them, they really do kind of play themselves. There are so many good little melodic or rhythmic or harmonic hooks or DNA in those tunes that if you just kind of aim for those, you can’t go wrong.
For “New Girl,” I'm a huge Duke Pearson fan. He's kind of an undersung pianist and composer of the era. He has a great record called Honeybuns. He's a great arranger, had a great big band and is such a great pianist too. He used a lot of flutes and kind of had the boogaloo influence going on, but also very rooted in jazz and swing.
FD: Is there anything else you might want to say about the album or to aspiring piano players?
TA: I just think all the cats on the record are such great individuals, and I would encourage whoever finds this record to go check them out and their music and their different projects. Gonzalo Teppa is a great bass player. He's really special and such a unique voice and light. Braxton Khan, the drummer, is a huge influence on me. Same with Taylor Clay. We play [together] every Monday night. And Nate Miller, the trumpet player, is such an amazing younger cat who just moved to town a few years ago, and he plays amazing trumpet and saxophone. He came onto the scene and kicked all of our asses a little bit, and we're all grateful for it.
For most of my life, I've been kind of the youngest guy in the band, and now I'm getting a little older and some amazing younger musicians are coming on the scene, and so it's just the natural progression of things.
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