Verve Records announces the release of Love Letter, a
parting masterpiece and the first all-ballads album from magisterial tenor
saxophonist-composer Jimmy Heath. The first single from the collection
"Con Alma" is out now. Love Letter will
be available worldwide on July 17 and is available by pre-order now.
In addition to original material, Love Letter is the jazz
ambassador's beautiful take on seminal ballads, including songs written by
Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Dorham. Recorded in New York during the 48 hours
preceding Jimmy's 93rd birthday, and two more a month later in Atlanta, Jimmy
presided over a brilliant cast of colleagues and friends. Propelling the album forward is a
multi-generational all-star unit, including NEA Jazz Master pianist Kenny
Barron, poll-winning guitarist Russell Malone, soulful vibraphone veteran Monte
Croft, New York first-call bassist David Wong, and all-world drummer Lewis
Nash. Augmenting the group on separate tracks are 21st century vocal superstars
Gregory Porter and Cécile McLorin Salvant, and trumpet icon Wynton Marsalis.
The collection includes Heath's elegant arrangements of
three less traveled originals culled from his vast body of work. He
distinctively interprets "Con Alma," an essential jazz standard by
Dizzy Gillespie, his lodestar from the moment they met in 1946. Joining him and
Kenny Barron in erudite, tender dialogue on trumpeter Dorham's "La
Mesha" is Marsalis. On "Don't Explain," the Dorham gem and
Arthur Herzog-Billie Holiday collaboration, Heath's soulful, trenchant, urbane
solo flights evoke his poetic spirit with old master concision and the
authoritative chops of a musician half his age.
A highlight in a program of highlights is Cécile McLorin
Salvant's poignant tour de force portrayal of unrequited love that is at the
core of Billie Holiday's lyric on the blue ballad "Left Alone,"
composed by Mal Waldron. Another is Gregory Porter's compelling, gentle reading
of Gordon Parks' underground classic "Don't Misunderstand."
"Jimmy always wanted to know the lyrics of a song
before playing it," says Carol Friedman, who co-produced Love Letter with
Grammy-winning producer Brian Bacchus. "That particular sensitivity no
doubt contributes to the intimacy of his sound and is the reason he loved
playing ballads - whether a tune had lyrics or not, he was singing with that
horn. This is the record Jimmy never got to make. Asking him if he wanted to do
an all-ballads album was preceded by decades of us talking about singers and
love songs."
Two of Heath's three originals on Love Letter gestate in
orchestral charts - "Fashion or Passion" comes from a 2004 Jazz at
Lincoln Center Orchestra commission, while "Inside Your Heart" -
Heath's only soprano saxophone vehicle on the date - is the second movement of The Endless Search,
a suite Heath recorded in 2010 with the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra. On the third original, it sounds as though
Billy Strayhorn was on Heath's mind when he wrote "Ballad from Upper
Neighbors Suite," which he'd previously addressed on a 1995 recording.
A listener unfamiliar with the back story of Love Letter
would not imagine that the main instrumental voice throughout the proceedings
is a jockey-framed 93-year-old man surely aware of his impending mortality and
facing it with pluck and equanimity. He brings the full breadth of his
intellectual powers to this final salvo. As Gary Giddins notes: "The
result is pure, primo Heath: polished, inventive, surprising, candid,
beautiful."
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