Adam Shulman
Adam Shulman – “Lover, I Hardly Know Her.” Counterplay at it’s finest.
Adam Shulman – Lover, I Hardly Know Her. Counterplay at it’s finest.
Anyone familiar with the Bay Area jazz scene knows that Shulman is a monster. Whether teaching, recording and terrorizing stages with his sextet, he is a beautiful musical force to be reckoned with.
“Love, I Hardly Know Her” is (in our opinion), a straight ahead, bebop inspired gem of counterplay at its finest. The melody gets traded and bounced between a trumpet and two saxes before breaking down in unison, on top of a rhythm section that carefully holds it all together.
First solo goes to Adam on the piano, where he stays in a melodic mood a la Oscar Peterson. Second solo goes to the tenor sax, bringing up memories of Coleman Hawkins and the harder tones of Stan Getz. Beautiful phrasing! Then the trumpet takes over with some punches that remind us of Maynard Fergusson’s softer passages. Finally, we go to an alto sax solo that reminds us of Johnny Hodges and “18 Carrots for Rabbit” – not sure why, it’s just the first thing that popped in our head. More educated jazzers will disagree, that’s fine, it’s still damn good.
Deep into the solos of this track, Shulman does a beautiful job of NOT letting his right foot get in the way of the soloist – his use of sustain is sparse, letting the others shine. His extensions and rhythmics are poetic, finding the perfect place between himself, the drums and the beautiful standup bass line. If we could play like Shulman, we wouldn’t be writing blogs for a living. 😉
Not sure why, but this recording (and record) are not listed on his website. We can only assume that it’s the same players in his well-known sextet that assisted on the record. We wish Mr. Shulman a long and beautiful career, hopefully he’ll keep sharing his talents with us and we hope you’ll give his work a listen.
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