Louis Stewart • Alone Together

Ireland has never been considered a hotbed of jazz activity but a few impressive players came from that island. Guitarist Louis Stewart (1944-2016) is considered to be Ireland’s greatest jazz musician, a fluent guitarist with his own sound who mostly played straight ahead jazz based in swing.  Early on he worked with British tenor-saxophonist Tubby Hayes, flugelhornist Clark Terry’s big band and Benny Goodman (1970), and later on with George Shearing (off and on during 1977-85) and tenor-saxophonist Spike Robinson. Stewart began recording a series of impressive albums as a leader in 1975 and of those nearly two dozen recordings, nine have thus far been reissued by the Livia label.

Alone Together teams Stewart with the virtuoso flutist Brian Dunning (1951-2022) who actually spent much of his career playing Irish music. However, as this duet set shows, Dunning (who only was featured on three jazz albums in his career) was a brilliant if little-documented improviser.

Taken from three Aug. 1979 concerts, this set of flute-guitar duets has many wondrous moments with plenty of remarkable unisons during melody statements, exciting tradeoffs, and dazzling solos. One never misses the rhythm section as the two musicians challenge each other on “There Will Never Be Another You,” a rapid “Donna Lee” (based chordwise on “Indiana”), and an assortment of jazz standards. Since this is a live set, there were no second opportunities to “fix” the performances but, as it turned out, no editing was needed. While they stretch themselves, the playing of Stewart and Dunning was quite flawless.

The CD reissue of Alone Together adds two previously unreleased studio performances (“Someday My Prince Will Come” and “West Coast Blues”) which have the duo expanding to a trio with the addition of bassist Martin Walsh. All in all, Alone Together is an excellent place to start in discovering the often-magical playing of Louis Stewart.

Louis Stewart • Alone Together
Livia LRCD 5
www.liviarecords.com

Scott Yanow

Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings. Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.