Rob Dixon/Steve Allee Quintet - Standards Deluxe
(Self Produced, 2024)
Tenor and soprano saxophonist Rob Dixon meld creative efforts with pianist Steve Allee, bassist Nick Tucker, and drummers Greg Artry and Kenny Phelps to provide support and comradery with vocalist Amanda King and trumpeter Derrick Gardner for a straight-ahead trip through s carefully curated standards and originals. This is not a recital of old and new tunes presented in some new and novel way, rather this is a sleekly stylized presentation of mainstream jazz, circa 1960, captured with the equally sleek and deliberate twenty-first century sonic and engineering.
Vocalist King steams things up with a humid take on Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” which she extrapolates to equally sensual readings of “The Very Thought Of You” and “Sway.” Trumpeter Gardner and Dixon reprise “Caravan” via bebop, 1950 while putting the darkness into the noir original “Luck Number 7.” The sound of this recording is excellent, revealing the band's orchestration, which is captured in a velvet expansion of carefully tempered sound. While this music would be considered “vintage” by today’s standards, it is so well-captured that it has a dense patina of freshness to it.