One of my guilty pleasures in music is listening to Bob Wilber on either soprano sax or clarinet. Taught by Sidney Bechet, Wilber’s sound and even his look have an old soul on an appeal. His music is always swinging, always happy and always seemingly ignored by the jazz snobs who insist that anything that isn’t cacophonous isn’t really jazz. Here, we’ve got a pair of concerts from the early 80s that have Wilber with honey toned trumpeter Glenn Zottola and a cooking team of Mark Shane/p, Mike Peters/g-banj, Len Skeat/b and, from Count Basie’s Orchestra, Butch Miles on drums. Pug Morton adds lovely vocals on a pair of tunes, but the reason you’re getting this 2 cd set is because you want to remember what horns are supposed to sound like.
On clarinet, Wilber is gloriously woody on “The Mooche” and hotter than h e double hockey sticks on “China Boy.” His soprano gives Johnny Hodges a nod on the luscious “Daydream” and rides with Zottola on blazing saddles on the white hot “Just One Of Those Things.” The front horns are febrile on “Oh, Lady Be Good” which also features some cooking soloing by Mike Peters, and the languid “Dans Le Rue D’Antibes, which saunters like a genteel aristocrat. Nothing pretentious here, and like the best cooks in the world, they let the basic ingredients speak for themselves, trusting in the essential good flavors the main products provide. The attitude of the whole pair of gigs and cds is summarized by the title of the last torrid piece: “Swing that Music.” Bon Appetite!
Classic Jazz Records
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