Jazz Album Review

*** DICK CARY’S

TUESDAY NIGHT FRIENDS

“Catching Up”

Klavier

Cary, who died in 1994 at the age of 77, was a remarkable multi-instrumentalist and an astoundingly prolific arranger-composer.

Not particularly familiar to the wider jazz audience, he was highly regarded by musicians, who were well aware of his fluent musicality.

Trumpeter-pianist-bandleader Dick Hamilton has assembled a group of the Southland’s most solid professionals--many of whom played in Cary’s “Tuesday Night Friends” rehearsal band--in a happy romp through a collection of Cary’s charts for a medium-sized jazz ensemble (drawn from four folios of arrangements, each of which contained anywhere from 25 to 800 selections).

The music is well-crafted and eclectic, sometimes reflecting Cary’s early association with traditional music (he was a pianist with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars in the late ‘40s), sometimes solidly fitting into the groove of the West Coast jazz style of the ‘50s.

Among the many fine soloists, there are sterling contributions from Hamilton, saxophonist Tommy Newsom, clarinetist Abe Most, guitarist Dave Koonse and trombonist Betty O’Hara.