Keep Your Heart Right

We Say...

Review by Britt Robson

Trombonist-composer Roswell Rudd continues to surprise and sustain open-minded listeners with utterly uplifting, unpredictable musical combinations. This time out it is a drummer-less quartet featuring female vocalist Sunny Kim, showcasing songs full of philosophical wit, whim and vigor. The opening title track is a woe-mocking delight (opening lyrics: “What’s gonna happen when the sky falls down?/ Don’t hurry/ Don’t worry/ You’re gonna live to see that day”) that Rudd wrote with Archie Shepp in 1965, done here with a dash of blues and boogie woogie that recalls the joie de vivre of Rudd’s Dixieland roots.

The indomitable humor continues on “I’m Going Sane (one day at a time),” which has the sort of hopscotch bop of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, complete with a spirited vocal scat and bass duet. In between, “Loved By Love” adapts the prose of Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and includes a lovely kazoo-like solo with Rudd blowing through his mouthpiece. Ditto “Look In the Mirror” for Rudd’s splatting vibrato that somehow folds neatly into a song about the acceptance of aging by treasuring what the times have wrought. By contrast, Rudd unleashes all of the huge, soulful power of his horn on the beautiful “The Light Within Me.”

After getting African and Afro-Cuban treatments on previous Rudd outings, “Bamako” is played in more a straight jazz vein with English lyrics here. Then there are two songs that harken to the leader’s New York roots: The gospelish “All Nite Soul” (which has a jaunty midsection) in tribute to the late Reverend John Garcia Genzel, and “Suh Blah Blah Buh Sibi,” a scat-sung bit of wordplay that approximates Rudd’s cab-driving career in Gotham. The disc closes with an only half-kidding warning about the evil of temptation (“Whatever Turns You On”) and an environmental lament (“You Blew It”) whose light-hearted music mitigates the accusatory lyrics and the mournful bass intro. Rudd, who is a longtime lion of the avant-garde, a scholar of Monk and Herbie Nichols, a longtime associate of the late Steve Lacy and much more than a dilettante with respect to African and Latin musics, has released one of his more “conventional” efforts here. It’s both a lifestyle prescriptive and a pleasant surprise.