Carol Morgan Quartet
Blue Glass Music
Blue Bamboo Music
Trumpet player Carol Morgan makes music that can soothe the savage beast. Her new album, Blue Glass Music from Blue Bamboo Music features her quartet comprised of herself, Joel Frahm on tenor saxophone, Martin Wind on bass, and Matt Wilson on drums. Her playing has an amenable quality that persuades the most reluctant listener to become enamored of jazz just as she is.
Cole Porter’s “I Love You” is an ephemeral maze that transitions the delicate strands of Morgan’s willowy chanting into heavy bebop grooves propped by zigzagging horns and resounding gongs. The buttery smoothness heard in Vernon Duke’s signature tune “April in Paris” is topped by Morgan’s scrolling glissandos rising up the scale and descending along the same path. The rhythmic kicks have a vintage ’60s sound which mutates into a tribal beating along the melodic passages of Ornette Coleman’s number “Lonely Woman” garbed in African toned accents and morosely-pitched trumpet wails.
The album brightens with the sleek ruminations of Morgan’s trumpet and Frahm ‘s sax displaying leisurely jaunts through “Booker’s Waltz,” which changes to a jumping dance-induced rhythm in “Glyph” penned by Frahm. The sunny vibe of “Where Are You?” is scalloped by the dreamy bebop bass strums of Martin Wind and the brushed strokes of drummer Matt Wilson as the jiggling notes of the horns gild the track in dazzling décor. The final track “Last Waltz” by Martin Wind has a somber sheen as the horns slope downward in a ring of sagging wails crimped by the lithesome beating of the rhythm section.
A Juilliard graduate, Carol Morgan has classical training in her background in addition to honing a lengthy history as a live performer. Morgan’s interpretations are designed to be played live, and Blue Glass Music compiles those incidents that make live music an experience to remember. Morgan enables the musicians to play whatever they want in that moment and live in their time together.
Musicians:
Carol Morgan – trumpet, Joel Frahm – tenor saxophone, Martin Wind – bass, Matt Wilson – drums and percussion
Tracklisting:
I Love You, April in Paris, Lonely Woman, Booker’s Waltz, Glyph, Where Are You?, Last Waltz