Review of Across 7 Street / Made in New York in Jazz Review (UK), issue 55, April 2004.

The "Smalls" label is a new one which spun out of the night club of the same name in New York. Let's hope the label has a better fate than the club which is now (temporarily?) closed. (I was once in
there and heard Roy Hargrove jamming with a seemingly endless change of pianists, drummers and bassists. The club only sold coffee to drink - and I had so much I didn't sleep for weeks.) Of that enough, what of the album under review? It's a post-bop quintet with a trombone/tenor front line, and I like that. Mosca is the first new trombone player I've heard on disc since David Gibson, although he's a veteran in the New York scene with a very good pedigree and a style somewhere near Curtis Fuller. Byars, another new one to me is, like all the band, a new Yorker who has been around for some time, a post-bop player but with influences which imply some free associations, technically superb and with a rich dark tone.

But it's not just the ability of the players here which impresses, it's the writing and arrangements. There is nary a standard on view and every tune is a band original which take Monk, Mingus and Andrew Hill as role models. Each one is an adventurous exercise in harmonic structure and they just don't go where a listener might expect them to. In so doing they stretch the technique of the players to the full. Unusually too there are twelve tracks here, the longest being seven minutes long, the rest about four or just over, so there is no chance to get bored with overblown solos nor any insistence on the usual theme, solos, theme model. Bassist Roland, a good backing player, takes his solos exclusively with bowed bass and this lends an unusual and effective difference to the solo work. Try any track to sample things but "Need I Say More?" would be a good one to get the flavour of this cracking album. If this is the standard which Smalls keep up they will be a welcome addition to the roster of burgeoning
independent labels who are telling the unfolding story of contemporary US jazz.

--Mike Rogers