Lovano's Quartet, Playing It Straight
Lovano strips things down to four players and lets the music breathe on its own terms.
By the time Joe Lovano recorded with a conventional piano quartet format, he had already spent years in the more open, spacious setting of Paul Motian's trio with Bill Frisell — a group where the absence of a chordal instrument was practically a compositional choice in itself. So when Lovano steps into a more traditional quartet lineup, the interesting question is whether he sounds liberated or slightly constrained. The answer, mostly, is neither. He sounds like himself, which turns out to be enough.
Lovano's tenor playing here has that slightly gruff, wide-vibrato thing he does that some people love and some find an acquired taste. He is not a clean, precise saxophonist in the way that, say, a hard bop purist might want. There is always a little wobble, a little extra air in the tone, and on this record that quality suits the material. The quartet format gives him a rhythm section to push against, and he uses that friction productively. The tempos are not always comfortable — some pieces sit in that mid-tempo range where a lesser player would just coast, but Lovano tends to find something worth saying anyway.
This is a solid record, not a revelatory one. If you already like Lovano, it gives you a good concentrated dose of what he does. If you are coming to him fresh, it is a reasonable place to start, though his work with Motian's trio might be the more distinctive entry point. The piano quartet setting is familiar enough that you can focus almost entirely on his playing without the format itself becoming a distraction, which is probably the point. Sometimes a straightforward setting is just what a player needs.
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