Steve Welsh - saxophones, flute, clarinet
Darragh O'Kelly - keys
Sean Maynard Smith - bass
Brendan Doherty - drums and percussion
Bassist Sean Maynard-Smith is following up the 2021 recording Eh, No and his more confidence-inducing title Actually, Yeah in 2023, with a release by the Pizza Jazz group aptly named Home Delivery. Born by way of the lactic workshopping of Luckys’ Pizza Jazz evenings at their regular residency in Dublin, Maynard-Smith and his fellows Darragh O’Kelly on keyboards and drummer Brendan Doherty are joined on Home Delivery by American saxophone expat Steve Welsh. What follows is a record that is eccentric in all the right ways.
It isn’t easy music to provide an overview of. Some moments seem to channel the lighter shades of 70s Stanley Clarke in Venusian mode, especially so when O’Kelly’s vintage synth meets Welsh’s flute, such as on the third track Languidity. Other times we are lured more towards firmer Jazz territory, for example with their rendition of the Ornette Coleman classic Ramblin’, which is now for all intents and purposes in the standard repertoire. The enduring fascination lies in the way the ensemble is emphasising some of the more introspective sides of 60s Free Jazz and 70s Fusion, yet at the same time there is a fingerprint of individuality that means drawing too many comparisons to past styles deny Home Delivery’s unconventionality it’s due acknowledgement..
You may well be listening and thinking, “oh yeah, I get it”, after the introductory Eve, which combines tenor saxophone and synth in eminently satisfying ways, with a whimsical drum machine intro that quickly acquiesces to Doherty’s wonderful straight-eight feel. Then, there is that track that defies all explanation: Foggy Day. It is a take on A Foggy Day, the George Gershwin classic. A pitch shifted vocal, from whence it came nobody knows, emerges from an uneasy union of reverb-laden over-dubbed saxophone replete with multiphonics and somewhat tweely-cheerful walking bass. I don’t know what on Earth I just listened to, but I dig it.
One of the tunes that perhaps most encapsulates what the Pizza Jazz boys are about on a normal day at Luckies is the trio version of Hermeto Pascoal’s Little Church. Written for Miles Davis’ Live Evil, the lads are in fine form here, essentially supporting O’Kellys lead through the rubato tone-poem. It is nice to have a moment when it is just the trio, with piano - no synths, and no edits, just playing through a beautiful composition. One can really hear the three listening to each other, and it is a lovely thing and feels organic.
Maynard-Smith’s original composition Perelandra is one of the most striking of the recording. An African-style bass ostinato sets up a floating melody delivered with beauty and splendour by Welsh on tenor saxophone and flute. Named after the second book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, this composition is likely an ode to Lewis’s green-skinned naked alien queen with psycho-spiritual abilities… surely. This is possibly the most self-assured of the record with Welsh delivering a solo that builds with restraint upon various motifs, before finally giving us us a small taste of the chromatic sixteenth notes without which we would simply wither. O’Kelly’s Rhodes is precisely what the precisely what the naked alien space-doctor ordered throughout, and the group as an entity feels very centred.
The lads play Arthur’s Jazz Club in The Liberties on Thursday, September 5th. All four of them will be in attendance and will definitely be playing material from the album, or definitely something else entirely. Tickets are available at the link below and the record will doubtless be available in all good record stores in the coming weeks.
Pizza Jazz 'Home Delivery' album launch
05 Sep 2024 - Arthur's Blues & Jazz Club - Dublin
https://www.jazzireland.ie/jazz-events/gig/5496-pizza-jazz.html
Home Delivery Available on Bandcamp
