Ricky Alexander Just Found Joy!

JUST FOUND JOY / People Will Say We’re in Love (Rodgers-Hammerstein). Sweet Lorraine (Cliff Burwell). King Porter Stomp (Jelly Roll Morton). Promenade (Ricky Alexander). It Had to Be You (Jones-Kahn). High Society (Porter Steele). Fine and Dandy (Kay Swift-Paul James). Don’t Blame Me (McHugh-Fields). Spring is Here (Rodgers-Hart). The Touch of Your Lips (Ray Noble). Rubber Plant Rag (George Cobb) / Ricky Alexander, sop-sax/cl/voc; Jon-Erik Kellso, tp; Brennen Ernst, gt; Dalton Ridenhour, Jon Thomas, pno; Bob Adkins, bs; Kevin Dorn, dm; Vanisha Gould, voc / Turtle Bay Records (no number)

I knew before putting this CD on that it would be in a retro-jazz style. #1, Ricky Alexander is playing clarinet and soprano sax, and the clarinet is no longer a front-line jazz instrument, and #2, all of the tunes on this album are older ones, including such New Orleans favorites as High Society and King Porter Stomp as well as a piece I’d never even heard of before, George C. Cobb’s Rubber Plant Rag. But I took a chance on it because the band included at least one bona-fide excellent musician, trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso.

And I’m glad I did because Alexander is a whale of an improviser in the old style. When he first started out, I immediately flashed on such New Orleans clarinetists as Barney Bigard and Jimmie Noone, but as he progressed and I heard that “rasp” in his tone I changed my mind and picked Edmond Hall as his primary influence. For those readers who don’t remember him, Hall was an outstanding clarinetist who combined the purity of Bigard with the “dirty” tone of players like Pee Wee Russell and Johnny Dodds. Then, reading the publicity sheet that came with the CD, I learned that I was right! It tells us tht “his love for the clarinet extended to the jazz masters Edmond Hall, Omer Simeon (Simeon played a lot like Bigard) and Johnny Dodds. Tell me I don’t know my jazz musicians!!

The one thing I don’t get is the picture of the goat on the front cover. And the back cover. I wonder if he’s Ricky Alexander’s support animal.

As I expected, Kellso is absolutely terrific on this session. Dig his solo on the opening track, which sounds like Roy Eldridge with a mute. Alexander’s own playing is well-schooled and shows a decent amount of creativity within a narrower range. He won’t blow you away with his brilliance, but he won’t disappoint either. And what a driving bassist Bob Adkins is! It is he who makes most of these  tracks swing. Alexander and Vanisha Gould sing a vocal duet on Sweet Lorraine, and I do mean a duet, blending their voices in thirds except for the break, when Alexander turns to his “fish horn” (as they used to call the soprano sax in the days of Sidney Bechet) while Gould keeps singing. Jon Thomas takes a very nice piano solo on this one, too.

King Porter  taken at a nice medium-up tempo, close to the one Benny Goodman took back in 1935 when Bunny Berigan was on trumpet. Nooo, Kellso isn’t as phenomenal as Berigan—who is? (as far as I’m concerned, Bunny is still in a class of his own)—but on this tune, aside from Alexander, it’s pianist Thomas who shines without trying to do an exact imitation of Jelly Roll Morton. Promenade is the kind of song that will run in your head for an hour after you’ve heard it, and you’ll be asking yourself, “Where did I hear this before?” but you haven’t because it’s an original tune by Alexander himself. Thomas is excellent here once again while guitarist Brennen Ernst plays one of those chorded solos that were so prevalent during the early swing era but disappeared once the influence of Django Reinhardt changed jazz guitar forever. Gould returns for a vocal on It Had to Be You. She has a nice voice if not much of one and can swing with a good amount of time displacement in her swing. Yet it is on this track that Kellso gives us a surprisingly good Berigan imitation! Go figure.

The band’s arrangement of Just One of Those Things is the most creative on the album, opening up with Kellso doing a surprisingly good Cootie Williams-type growl while Alexander plays the “gingerbread” around him. The rhythm section almost has a sort of rolling shuffle beat behind them—not quite, but almost, and it fits the mood of their playing very well. One thing you can say for Alexander, he has a strong sense of construction in his solos, which always makes them pleasing to hear despite not being harmonically daring. On this track, too, Ernst sound a bit like Everett Barksdale, Art Tatum’s last guitarist in his trio. The band updates High Society in a manner similar to the way Jelly Roll Morton did it in 1939. Except that Morton had Sidney Bechet on his version. And Sidney could absolutely steamroll you with his swing. Yet Kellso and Alexander have a really nice chase chorus on this one; in fact, Kellso prods Alexander to up his game here.

Gould is back again on Fine and Dandy, opening with just piano behind her. As I said, she’s a pretty good swinger, but no one is going to confuse her with Connee Boswell or Anita O’Day. Alexander’s clarinet solo is really good on this one, however, and so is Kellso’s. Alexander’s singing on Don’t Blame Me sounds like a more baritonal version of Chet Baker. Kind of eerie, but still good. The band also gives a brisker tempo to Ray Noble’s old ballad, The Touch of Your Lips with Kellso doing a nice Roy Eldridge imitation. As for Rubber Plant Rag, it has one of those perpetual motion melodies, here updated with an early swing beat. Alexander shows off his rich lower clarinet register on this one.

In short, Alexander’s CD is a very pleasant listen, a break from all the ultra-serious  (and sometimes edgy or depressing) modern jazz we hear around us.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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