Kirk MacDonald – Vista Obscura

Last year, Toronto tenor saxophonist Kirk MacDonald invited a special guest, New York-based trumpeter Tom Harrell, to pitch in on his superb album Symmetry. MacDonald, whose composing and arranging talents are often overlooked given the eloquence and energy of his improvising, crafted a perfect setting for Harrell, playing to his strengths with harmonically rich contemporary originals.

I offer this recap to help highlight MacDonald’s modus operandi with his late 2014 release Vista Obscura. This time out, the American guest star is jazz piano elder statesman, Harold Mabern, who at 78 has almost two and a half decades on MacDonald. Again, MacDonald has been the soul of hospitality, aligning the program to Mabern’s playing. The self-taught, Memphis-born legend is a blues-based player with a knack for driving, minor-key, modal playing, and Vista Obscura steers the music into Mabern’s wheelhouse.

So, the opener on MacDonald’s CD is a romp through John Coltrane’s Lonnie’s Lament, swung energetically, as Joe Lovano did on his Quartets: Live at the Village Vanguard album. In addition to MacDonald and Mabern, bassist Neil Swainson and Montreal drummer Andre White — a spot-on pairing although they live in different cities — provide crisp, centered propulsion.

Coltrane’s mid-period music is a guiding theme elsewhere on the disc too, most explicitly on an extended version of Naima and on MacDonald’s composition You See But You Don’t Hear, a charging straight-eighths tune that has Impressions at its foundation. On both tracks, MacDonald shares the limelight with another guest, his fellow post-Coltrane saxophonist Pat LaBarbera, who enlarges the band to a quintet and doubles the CD’s dose of muscular tenor playing.

LaBarbera also blows fiercely on The Mill Dam, a bossa-ish minor blues. In the same spirit is the quartet tune There But For The Grace Of…, Mabern’s stirring song for the homeless that finds great dignity in the sound of the blues. The disc’s other tracks are MacDonald compositions that stress lyrical melodies and more complex harmonic excursions. Calendula is a fetching waltz that MacDonald has recorded a few times — it’s a modern-day Canadian jazz standard if ever there was one. There’s a nice Swainson solo on this track, plus a bonus-like showcase for Mabern that seems to me to be crafted for him. Walkaround is a medium-tempo, swaggering swinger. The title track and the closing track Mira Nights are slow bossas that offset the more robust playing elsewhere on the album. by Peter Hum – The Ottawa Citizen

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Juno award winning saxophonist & composer and nine-time nominee Kirk MacDonald hosts legendary American pianist Harold Mabern alongside Canadian greats bassist Neil Swainson, drummer André White, and saxophonist Pat LaBarbera.