The Chesky label isn’t dead, apparently. The name may not be familiar, though it used to be a port of call for recordings of the highest quality, capturing creative artists that for the most part were unknown in a marvellous clean and far less compressed fashion than usual, bringing oodles of extra sonic joy, finesse and pleasure to many audiophiles at the start of the century.
The Chesky records label was established by Norman and David Chesky and has released around 635 albums covering the sounds that have identified the highbrow late nineties and the start of the noughties music scene. Yours truly has gone and counted the various CD and CD/SACDs in his collection, so you don’t have to suffer, and found 14 of them, but I suspect that as I lost the will to live while rummaging and in places sifting through a substantial number of CDs, there may be a few more of them in my possession.
The McCoy Tyner Quartet’s New York Reunion was recorded in 1991 (to strike dread and possibly nostalgia in hearts of those who may have been adults by then…34 years ago) at a time when humanity was recovering from the cultural low points of styles such as disco and punk.
The album is contains the bebop and hardbop sounds of the fifties and sixties. This quartet; McCoy Tyner (grand piano), Joe Henderson (tenor sax) Ron Carter (double bass) and Al Foster (drums and percussion), came to the fore during those years and made their mark on many occasions, often playing and recording with the likes with Miles Davis and John Coltrane to name but two.
New York Reunion feels in many respects like a more mature, more sedate and slightly nostalgic look at yesteryear, with gentler expressions and interpretations that veer towards the melodious and harmonious and incorporate more blues in them. This contrasts with the styles that dominated the jazz sound of those eras, but fear not, the bebop and the bop are in evidence throughout.
The album was recorded over two days using the large soundstage in Manhattan’s RCA Studio A, it contains eight tracks of standards that were adapted by many jazz msuicians of that era as well as picks from the band member’s careers such as A Quick Sketch that was written by Carter for Herbie Hancock in 1982.
By today’s standards this is a long affair stretching to over 73 minutes, it sounds like a musical love letter to an era which by that time was long gone. The review sample furnished for the occasion was a compressed download of the album. Fortunately I have a track from the album on a previously released CD (Chesky 10th Anniversary) I can attest to the fact that all of Chesky’s hallmarks of accurate, open but never bright recording with wide if not the deepest sound stage are present and accounted for here.
Three of the protagonists who played on this magnificent album are no longer with us, McCoy Tyner passed away at the age of 82 in 2020, Joe Henderson left in 2001 and Al Foster passed away only a few month ago at a similar age to McCoy Tyner. Ron Carter is still around and has become one of the most prolific and respected figures in jazz.
Jazz fans will likely like, and possibly fall in love with most of this album, for others it could well be a revelatory musical journey through a time when jazz was largely defined by the harsh realities and sounds of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The album will be released / reissued in a 180g One Step pressing double pink vinyl LP, hybrid stereo SACD and MQA-CD, and be in no doubt, also available for downloads in various high resolution versions.
Reuben Klein