Evan Christopher is serious about New Orleans jazz. Our cover profile of him highlighted his commitment to high order artistic expression from within a set of musical devices available to that jazz tradition. "Artistically", he says in the liner notes to his new album "the real challenge is not only to use [the] vocabulary responsibly but to make it contemporary at the same time."
Christopher's career is a force of will, and he has an ambitious recording schedule to prove it. His latest release for Jazzology explores The Art of the New Orleans Trio with two classic instrumentations featured. The first half of the 12 track album finds him with Kris Tokarski on piano and Benny Amon on drums. Both are among the young musicians who have flocked to the city since Hurricane Katrina. The rest of the album has him with Don Vappie on guitar and Peter Harris on bass. Both have long local careers behind them.
The result is not a sense of two contrasting albums but simply a shift in tone. The pump of piano and drums has an easy energy giving the feel of a full New Orleans band. With a guitar and bass backing it is harder to lift out of the café jazz vibe but this threesome is up to the task. The local heat, the "elasticity of the beat", as Christopher puts it, is maintained throughout.
All but three tracks are original compositions. Christopher consciously adopted chord progressions fro
