You and Me: The Emeryville Sessions, Vol. 4

Noel Jewkes has cultivated his jazz career over many decades in the benign environment of Northern California. Like the wines cultured so nicely in these parts, the tasty sounds of Noel’s reeds are a high point of a night out in jazz-friendly venues from the Seahorse in Sausalito to the Club Deluxe in San Francisco to the 7 Mile House in Brisbane. This disc, produced by the estimable Akira Tana and recorded in nearby Emeryville and El Cerrito, is another serving of our delicious musical treasure to the rest of the listening world. You’ll find an infectious love of life, apparent from the get-go in Noel’s playing and composition of the opening tracks. His honeyed yet virile approach on alto sax to Rosie Lee partners with, and sets up, solos by the bop-wise Joe Cohn, one of two great guitarists featured on this album. For I Really Dig Your Skin, Noel switches to clarinet and the guitar chair passes to Jeffrey Burr, whose chordal colorings extend artfully to the upper and lower reaches of his fretboard.Denizens of Bay Area jams are well aware of how effortlessly Noel travels through different eras of jazz history. He takes on Charles Mingus’s Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love, itself a loving take on the big band sound, viewing it warmly and foggily through his luminous soprano sax. He then opens the American Songbook to Cole Porter’s You’’d Be So Nice to Come Home To, sweet-talking his tenor sax through some surprising readings of, and improvisations on, the familiar melody. He’s in good swingingcompany with Cohn, while bassist John Wiitala follows suit in duskier, juicier tones. On these tracks, and the ensuing I’ll Remember April, Noel and his producer effectively showcase the solo talents of their collaborators. Without drums, the ensemble is rendered more elastic, somehow closer to the charm of human love-talk. The team of Cohn and Jewkes skips prettily through the intervals of Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz, later trading eights, Noel effecting sassy drags on his soprano. And at no additional cost, you get a marvelous intro and outro for this already lively standard. Benny Carter’s Key Largo is transposed a few thousand miles south where it becomes a bossa. Noel’s breathy alto works sensuously against the beat, in a manner evocative of Stan Getz. The clarinet’s invocation of Hudson’s and Mills’s 1933 hit Moonglow is so darnedsweet and romantic that it brings to mind the magical allure of the dance in Picnic, even absent the familiar counterpoint theme George Dunning added to that film soundtrack in 1955. Jewkes and Cohn trace warm halos around that moon before stepping out to a different sort of dance on One Note Samba, where they trade cleanly with each other and deftly decorate the bridge. This whimsical tune by Tom Jobim showcases how cannily Noel articulates an instrument. His soprano may be repeating a note a couple dozen times, but his intonation and subtly varied timing enhance the composition and its lyricism. You and Me is Noel’s own tune, though its clarinet and classic postwar seductive sound summon you and me back to the Moonglow bandstand. This well-written piece belongs in every band’s book of jazz standards. And that’s no surprise, because we’re in the presence of a master musician with deep musical experience, heard nicely here elegantly overdubbing the soprano to the clarinet track. The album’s closing track, with its sneaky, snaky tenor line and suave support from Cohn and Wiitala, could also serve as the leader’s promise: The Best Is Yet to Come. And we should come and get it where we can. But what we’ve been hearing for the past sixty years - Noel first formed a band at age 12 - has already been pretty damn good. Jeff Kaliss Music journalist and authorSan Francisco, December 2014