Jazz

Arbors Records · 28 August 2026

“Stranger on the Shore” is the piece that doesn’t fit the programme: a clarinet melody Acker Bilk wrote in 1961 that went to number one in the United States, here with Houston Person’s tenor out front. Everything around it comes from the Great American Songbook.

Person is ninety-one — he turns ninety-two on 10 November — and has been recording for more than sixty years. He does it here with a sextet at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Eddie Allen on trumpet, John di Martino on piano, James Chirillo on guitar, Sean Smith on bass and Vince Ector on drums, who works mostly with brushes.

Twelve titles and none of them his, and three by Ellington: “Satin Doll”, “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”, among the most recorded pieces in all of Ellington. The programme also almost never leaves ballad tempo, which leaves the sextet nothing to solve: what will happen in each track is settled before it starts, and what actually moves is Chirillo’s guitar and those brushes.

It closes on a medley of “We’ll Be Together Again” and “Goodbye”, and the track the sextet stretches out on most is “The Nearness of You”.

Rating: 7.8/10

Text by Aina Torrents