Music
An unlikely comeback for harmonica player P.T. Gazell began, quite improbably, with a fan’s Google search for his name a few years ago. It’s now picked up momentum from his new album, Swingin’ Easy…Hittin’ Hard, only his second record as a leader and his first in 27 years. As he tells his tale in the North Nashville post-production studio that’s been his workplace for a couple of decades, it’s clear that he’s back in stride—a more mature and steady stride at that—and sounds as good as ever.
Swingin’ Easy has Gazell at the front of a spacious jazz rhythm section, including local players Roger Spencer on bass, Chris Brown on drums and guitarist Andy Reiss. Vibe player Kirby Shelstad also adds colors and counterpoints on a few tracks. Gazell’s set of swing covers, mostly of tunes from the Great American Songbook, are guided by the warm, homey feel of his diatonic harp playing. Even though his solos reflect years of practiced techniques, his voice, tone and pacing come off as naturally as an end-of-the-workday jam.
Going into the recording studio, Gazell’s combo, the Side Effects, knew they were going to do no more than two takes of any single track and aimed for live group interplay rather than multi-tracked perfectionism. The leader wanted the album to sound as if it had come out of the late ’50s and early ’60s, an era in which ensembles still played together but the audio equipment had also reached a high-water mark. Given his experience in sound editing for film and other media, what could have been a studied period sound has a relaxed immediacy.
Songs like Frank Loesser’s “If I Were a Bell,” long fixed in the minds of anyone in the world of mainstream jazz, were introduced to Gazell fairly late in his life, during the period when he’d walked away from his career as a performing musician. Born in Kentucky, he built up his chops playing bluegrass. By the time he’d heard about the Google query and the response it generated, Gazelle thought that his first album, Pace Yourself, long out of circulation, was generally forgotten. Instead, this cult-like buzz led to him to remaster and reissue the 1978 album, which in its way was a lost gem, taking bluegrass harp about as far as it could go. Gazell trades speedy, ornate lines, note for note, with newgrass giants Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas. Two previously unreleased Western swing tracks from his days with Johnny Paycheck round out the CD.
Gazell would be the first to admit that Pace Yourself is a young man’s album, a dazzling show of all of his techniques compressed into less than an hour, and that he’s no longer playing the same way. Now he chooses his material more on the basis of expressive potential than genre. He also doesn’t see the boundaries between jazz, country and bluegrass songs as anything more than conventions: improvisational flexibility and an openness to mixing modes unite the most creative players in all of these traditions. (www.ptgazell.com)
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