Jazz

Strikezone Records · 21 August 2026

The organ and the guitar are in charge from the first bar. Sam Fribush on Hammond B3 and Dave Stryker on guitar are half of a quartet that makes no secret of where it comes from: “Sly Vibe” (5:15) opens on a two-beat groove that never slackens and that Richard Floyd holds without conceding a bar. Rob Dixon plays tenor with a broad sound and little appetite for ornament. Across eight tracks, only on the ballad “I Want You” (5:29) does he change instrument and move to soprano: those are the five minutes where the record eases off, and the other forty all settle back into the same groove.

Naptown is the nickname for Indianapolis, where Dixon has lived for decades, and the record is built as a declaration of belonging. Two Wes Montgomery themes come in, “Bumpin’ on Sunset” and “Naptown Blues”, which say which school is being talked about here: the city gave us Montgomery and his brothers Monk and Buddy, and also J.J. Johnson, Freddie Hubbard and Slide Hampton. There are four Dixon compositions, one opening the album and three closing it in a row: “The Earth, The Sky”, “Fields and Valleys” and “Four One”. The two remaining tracks are covers from outside the band’s own book: “Walking in Rhythm” and “I Want You”.

These are four musicians who play this language with a command nobody is going to dispute, and who have recorded nearly forty-five minutes without an ugly moment in them. Nor is there one that puts anybody on the spot: Dixon’s four originals move inside the vocabulary Montgomery had already fixed in the same city sixty years ago, and the record ends exactly where it promised it would. Dixon has the track record to afford himself a song that goes wrong.

Rating: 7.3/10

Text by Aina Torrents