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Rating: Imagine being in your favorite CD store. Done? Great, now you have "Live in Japan 2003" (Soundhills - 2003) by Billy Cobham, Kenny Barron, and Ron Carter in your hands. What are you doing!! Are you still standing there like a codfish? Run to the checkout, pay, and rush home. Take the car, the bus, the subway, a taxi, the airplane, whatever you want, just hurry up. Once past the entrance door, if the elevator is occupied start taking the stairs. There's no time. Run. Are you home now? Disconnect the phone. Is there noise in the next room? Let them quiet down! Is someone watching TV? Turn it off, damn it!!
Now turn on your stereo system. Insert the CD into the player. Adjust the volume. Take the remote control. Find a comfortable position: armchair, sofa, floor, do as you wish. Turn off the light, mind you. Play. So? Isn't it amazing that these sounds are produced by three guys with more than 180 years combined? Where the hell do they get all this energy from?
Kenny Barron's motto is "play with heart." You can tell, right? He's not a man, he's a waterfall of notes. He knows how to be melodic, virtuosic, creative, expressive like very few others. It's no wonder he's been one of the most sought-after jazz pianists for almost forty years.
And what about Ron Carter. This guy has played with everyone: Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, George Benson, Wynton Marsalis. Does he seem tired to you? Listen to his solos, especially the one in "Body and Soul". There's more energy and warmth in his left hand than in dozens of miserable twenty-something worshipped pseudo-musicians who undeservingly occupy stages around the world.
And Billy Cobham? Someone like him could easily spend his old age in front of the fireplace with his grandchildren. He has nothing to prove to anyone. And instead, what does he do? He travels half the world playing the drums in a MONSTROUS way, see the solo in "Out of Nowhere", simply amazing, and developing projects like "The Art of Jazz Series", which intends to revisit the art of jazz music, from the form of the trio to that of the big band.
And if you thought that standards like "Autumn Leaves," "Stella by Starlight," and "Round Midnight" had nothing left to say, if in your opinion the music of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie belongs to the past, what do you think now? The problem is never the music from which you start, but the musicians who invent and interpret it. There are many musicians who have nothing to say, at least no longer. Shooting stars that last the span of five years. Others, like Cobham, Barron, and Carter, transcend the barriers of time and as long as they can, they will always have something to say. All it takes is a scrap of a melodic theme, a double bass, a piano, a drum set, and an audience. Unmissable!
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