Legends & Mentors

Legends & Mentors
JKNM Records

Legends & Mentors is a perfectly realized recording — a masterful document by five musicians who’ve been all but entirely eclipsed by the monumental shadows their mentors have cast.

Subtitled “The Music of McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef,” the album finds bassist and decades-long Tyner (as well as brief Shepp and Lateef) sideman Avery Sharpe joined by Tyner/Shepp alumni John Blake (violin) and Joe Ford (saxes, flute). Filling out the rhythm section are pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs (Kenny Burrell sideman) and the youngest member, drummer Winard Harper, most widely known for his association with pianist and educator Billy Taylor.

That Sharpe has formed this band to consider the music of such greats is not particularly remarkable, and neither are the covers.

More impressive are the original tunes and clever programming of the recording. Divided into three sections, each contains three tunes, opening with an Avery original honoring each mentor, followed by two covers. A particularly fine example is track four, “The Chief (Bro. Shepp),” which opens with Ford’s tenor and Blake’s violin doubling — a blend that works brilliantly throughout the disc — on an infectiously loping head. Solos follow, with Ford working the tune’s fundamentals, Sharpe delivering an all-too-brief bit of spit and polish (a reminder Tyner has had it very good), and Blake exploring the upper register.

That high-and-tight number is upstaged only by the last cut, an 11-minute workout of Lateef’s “Because They Love Me.” More loose and relaxed than the rest of the album, this final cut not only allows the quintet greater stretch, but provides Harper his most apparent moment of sensitivity and cleverness, which is subtly evident throughout. (Jonathan B. Frey)