Stanley Turrentine – Everybody Come On Out [1976; Bellaphon, Fantasy]

With a spread of jazz from hard bop to smooth sax, this album shows band-leader Stanley Turrentine and his sizable group of backing musicians (with almost three dozen contributors credited) playing with more of an ear towards experimentation than consistency. That approach, along with the rotation of the band’s line-up and all but one of the songs being covers (the exception being “There Is A Place (Rita’s Theme)“, written by Pamela Turrentine), doesn’t keep the group from maintaining a recognizable character and steady quality to the music, though.

While some of that persistence is attributable to the department-store production, the majority of it is due to the clear skills of the performers, which bring frissons of lively embellishment along with solid foundations to each song. With all of it kept instrumental, the little touches are allowed more clarity, and there’s quite a few passages into the lush details of which a listener can just let themselves pleasantly sink. The occasional chintziness is minor enough as to not impact things too much, and the whole of it comes off well, if a little too wide in scope.

Les McCann – Talk to the People [1972; Atlantic]

Merging funky jazz with heart-felt soul, the songs of this album split their time between letting Les McCann lead with his powerfully emotive vocals, and letting the band take over for some high-style (and higher energy) instrumental pieces. In the vocal tracks, the band provides a gentle atmosphere, showing its members’ strengths through soft inflections, tonal control, and atmospheric richness, while those same qualities are brought out in higher levels, and with more playfulness, for the instrumental works. The album ends up feeling more like a collection of studio cuts than something put together around a few core ideas, but it’s still some strong work and beautiful playing, and the soft flow of the music blurs the separation of the songs to help it hold together more than firmer direction would have.

Carmen McRae & The Kenny-Clarke Francy Boland Big Band – November Girl [1975; Black Lion Records]

One in a string of Carmen McCrae’s collaborations, this album joins the soulful jazz singer with one of the numerous incarnations of the big band headed by pianist Francy Boland and drummer Kenny Clarke, giving the joint sessions successful operations in moods of joy, sorrow, and mixtures of the two. Despite the size of the big band (sixteen members in all, with five on saxophones alone), the songs are kept neat and precise in their performance, with practically no improvisational tangents to be heard, and exacting deployment of supporting or underscoring lines.

The album’s stand-out track may be “Dear Death”, which finds McRae imploring death to take her to join her departed lover, with the wind instruments wrapping carefully around her longing delivery. However, all of the songs are high quality in both structuring and emoting, though a couple are so short as to seem almost out of place. Fine jazz and a great combo, but unfortunately, the eight songs together add up to less than half an hour’s worth of material.

Here’s the cover art used for the Italian reissue.

Grover Washington, Jr. – Inner City Blues [1971; Kudu]

Packing six cover songs (two of them originally by Marvin Gaye), this jazz album moves in bursts, whether shrilling along on hard saxophone blats, dodging about on staccato drum-work, or giving the spot-light over to one of the other musicians, almost two dozen of whom feature alongside Grover Washington. As the first album released under Washington’s own name, the all-cover line-up makes sense for the purposes of proving himself using pre-tested material, but the saxophonist operates so smoothly and confidently with his collaborators that any roughness there might have been is effectively erased.

Though the majority of the songs are fully instrumental, the rare deployments of vocals (most noticeably on “Ain’t No Sunshine”) match the rest of the arrangements in the clear consideration of how to make the numerous elements best work together in service of the music. Too spiky and twisting to fit the smooth jazz label, it does still share some of the lulling effects of that style, so that while the musicianship is excellent, it can feel, if not dull, at least a little soporific. That slickness is impressive for a first album, but at the same time, a little more rawness would have helped bring some of the emotionality out into clearer relief.

Here’s the cover art used for the album’s Spanish release as Jazz & Blues, Vol. 28.