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Rating: This splendid album simply titled "Encounters", recorded in 1957 by Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, with the significant contribution of Oscar Peterson on piano, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, and Alvin Stoller, and produced by Norman Granz in a state of grace, begins with suave and playfully melancholy notes.
As we said, a record that opens with this "Blues for Jolande" with its very "cool" and sly pace (one of the first tracks recorded with the "new" stereo technology!!), with the two sacred monsters chasing each other, following the "warm" and passionate notes of their instruments (trumpets and sax, to be exact).
An album with few intellectual pretenses but, perhaps because of this, exudes a certain viscerality and passion not always found in jazz of those years. With "It Never Entered My Mind", the music slows down and becomes a companion and friend to night bar confessions with unconditional surrender to alcohol and melancholy, as a finale. Here the two take turns with great mastery, coloring the track with really enviable stylistic and formal elegance, supported by the barely suffused touch of a discreet piano with even more delicate double bass and drums. With "La Rosita", we enter a slightly "Latin" atmosphere with a soft carpet of "beguine" percussion giving an assist to the two wind instruments that support everything with the usual impeccable elegance. More swinging and sustained is "You'd be so nice..." while with the subsequent "Prisoners of love" we return to the pleasantly suffused atmospheres of the slow and more atmospheric repertoire, and on the same wavelength plays the following "Tangerne". With "Shine on Harvest Moon", we return to a "blues" form always performed on tiptoe, seemingly always (and only) designed to highlight the harmonic pleasure of the sound textures crafted by the two masters in a continuous exchange of (musical) cues, with solos that resume exactly where the colleague's ends.
I repeat, this is not a "cerebral" and complex album but an almost "drunk companion" album that pleasantly keeps us company for almost 45 minutes. Suitable for those days when everything seems to fall apart and there seems to be no alternative between drowning thoughts in the arms of any woman or clinging to the neck of a whiskey bottle.
Well, now know that there might be the famous "third way": listening to this album on loop. Simple, unpretentious, and, in its own way, pleasant even for those who don't really get jazz. In short, not a "difficult" album for the usual few aficionados. Bau bye.
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