Victor Goines & Friends – Woodlawn Cemetery – June 3, 2018
Goines is an oft-seen element of the Jazz-at-Lincoln-Center/New Orleans pipeline, occasionally a group leader, as he was in this instance. He’s got some cool friends indeed – top-shelf pianist Diehl had been on my radar screen for some time now, whereas Felder and Rampton were not there at all, and thus unanticipated delights. The cemetery is final resting place for many jazz greats, lending a narrative structure to the set list (here’s one by Duke Ellington, here’s one by Coleman Hawkins, etc.) that closed with Miles Davis’s “So What”. My personal highlight was a piano/soprano sax duet composed by the buried-elsewhere Sidney Bechet.
Victor Goines
Aaron Diehl
Marion Felder
Yasushi Nakamura
Kenny Rampton