Smalls Records -- Press




	Stereophile Magazine May 2007 Three Tenors By Thomas Conrad Chris Byars / Photos in Black, White and Gray (Smalls) Performance ** ½ Sonics Ned Goold / March of the Malcontents (Smalls) Performance ½ Sonics 1/2 Grant Stewart / In the Still of the Night (Sharp Nine) Performance * ½ Sonics ** ½ Why put these three albums together? Because Chris Byars, Ned Goold, and Grant Stewart are three of the best tenor-sax players you’ve never heard. They have other qualities in common. They all learned their craft at Smalls, the underground Greenwich Village club whose capacity is tiny and whose influence has been huge. They all sound like stylistic conservatives with tones on the lighter side of the soft/hard tenor-sax spectrum. And each is more modern then he at first seems. Chris Byars, though 36, is spiritually at home in music from the middle of the last century, by such people as Lucky Thompson and Gigi Gryce. He is an instantly likable player because of his sweet sensuous sound on his three saxophones (he also plays alto and soprano) and the agile grace with which his ideas flow. But the more you listen to Byars, the more you hear the subtle tension between his surface smoothness and the underlying complexity of his chord movements, phrase lengths, accents, and intervals. His amiable traditional aesthetic is refracted through postmodern relativities of form. Photos in Black, White and Gray contains all Byars originals. His writing, like hisplaying, is meticulous, sophisticated, and deceptive. Byars the composer creates sinuous lines (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) and dancing, elegant celebrations (“Manhattan Valley”) that sound as inevitable and complete as any jazz standard—and the Byars the improviser reveals their ambiguities and improves on them. He is supported here by three exceptional players associated with the Smalls scene, pianist Sacha Perry (whose blockiness is the perfect counterpoise to Byars’ suave polish), Ari Roland (perhaps the best arco bass soloist in jazz), and dialed-in drummer Andy Watson. If Chris Byars is tricky, Ned Goold is full enigmatic. As with every stylistic innovator, it’s easiest to hear what Goold is doing when he plays a standard. Over the nine minutes of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” his phrases, broken into fragments in odd places, configure a wildly imaginative abstraction of Cole Porter. Yet his breathy tone and even, rolling beat suggest that this is cool/bop business as usual. It is not. The way Goold functions in relation to chord change is unique. His note choices are constantly unexpected, and he does not play licks or clichés. Someday someone will write a technical treatise on the musical language that Goold has invented, and it will probably involve theoretical elements like synthetic scales and indeterminate tonality, retrogressive harmonies (which is why he sometimes sounds like a man falling upstairs), and intricate counterintuitive syncopation patterns. Until then, the most important fact about Goold is that he uses his language to create fascinating, stunningly fresh, internally logical designs with a strange beauty all their own. His music epitomizes Whitney Balliet’s famous description of jazz as “the sound of surprise.” Luke Kaven’s Smalls label has become invaluable by documenting the work of important, under-appreciated artists such as Byars and Goold. […]