Joey DeFrancesco’s luxuriant new album is a pleasure to listen to, running with all the colours available to keyboards, trumpet, sax, guitar and drums, infusing a bright selection of original tunes and standards with essence of cool jazz.
The great arranger Quincy Jones, no less, pays fulsome tribute to DeFrancesco in a liner note. "Joey DeFrancesco," he writes, " is, without a doubt, one of the greatest (Hammond) B-3 players since Jimmy Smith, and he sure has the chops to prove it.
DeFrancesco’s own Karma, which runs to almost seven minutes, swings light and piquant and features polished Hammond from the man himself yielding to delightfully warm guitar from Dan Wilson. Meantime, Jason Brown lays down the subtlest of beats and Troy Roberts blows some sympathetic sax. Better than Yesterday is enigmatic but intimate, with De Francesco's signature florid musicality on full display. On a track called One, pal Joey leaves the keys for, well, 6 mins 11 seconds to lay down some sweetly winsome trumpet.
Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come gets a sturdy reading full of muscle and blood, the whole thing riding along on DeFrancesco’s virtuoso, near ubiquitous Hammond. A big tune in safe hands. Another big tune given the full-blown gospel treatment is Lift Every Voice and Sing, credited as a traditional ballad from the year 1899.
Another DeFrancesco composition, the title track Project Freedom flits delightfully along, with exhilaration and verve. The band's on top of their game, guitar and organ and sax talking back and forth to each other, as it were. The Unifier is completely different, traces of funk and soul as guitar, Fender Rhodes, Hammond - and wah wah pedal for the keyboards at one point - blend in intensity and build over eloquent drum lines.
Not a dropped stitch or suggestion of a glitch in uniformly impeccable playing all around on Project Freedom. DeFrancesco has over 30 albums to his name and 41 years musical service, including a stint as a teenager playing keyboards / synthesizers in Miles Davis's band. The musician is all about perfection combined with free-flowing joie de vivre, a heady combination surely. mackavenue.com
Paddy Kehoe
