Jimmy Heath: (BMG Camden)
Despite the scale and quality of Jimmy Heath's talents - he plays tenor, alto, soprano and flute, besides composing and arranging - he has never been a big jazz name. It's all the more astonishing, given the calibre of the music on this budget double-CD set. Deploying the full range of his gifts in three complete albums - The Time And The Place, New Picture and Peer Pleasure - he made for Landmark/Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, they reveal a superb, adventurous craftsman and, especially on tenor, a front-rank hard bop soloist. No news to musicians, this; these sessions are graced by such luminaries as Pat Martino, Curtis Fuller, Stanley Cowell, Tommy Flanagan and Billy Higgins as proof of his standing among the jazz elite.
By Ray Comiskey
Jimmy Scott: Holding Back The Years (WEA)
Everybody who is - or, maybe, was - anybody loves Jimmy Scott, the singer rediscovered after years in obscurity; Madonna, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Cave and Ray Charles are all fans. And in the emotion-drenched vocals on this new release, what certainly impresses is his superb gift for phrasing and the lived-in septuagenarian falsetto delivery, which can invest even the least impressive songs - and there are some here - with dignity. But there's a sameness, and not merely a sameness of slow tempi, about his approach on this album that suggests manner over substance, an impression reinforced by a comparison of his version of Elvis Costello's lovely Almost Blue with Chet Baker's gorgeous trumpet and vocal interpretation. Scott's good, but not that good.
By Ray Comiskey