Orrin Evans – Freedom (Posi-Tone): It’s been a good year for Philly jazz pianist and composer-performer Orrin Evans. Back in March, Evans’s Captain Black Big Band – an ensemble sometimes boasting up to 38 musicians from New York City and Philly – released their self-titled album of recordings from live dates in NYC and Chris’s Jazz Cafe in Philly, and without wasting any time, in marches Freedom. Evans’s resume features many famed and diverse collaborators – Mos Def, Common, Pharoah Sanders, Branford Marsalis – but on Freedom, his goal’s to reflect on his development specifically within Philly’s jazz tradition. During informal encounters and his years as a student at Girard Music Academy and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, he has studied and worked with local musicians like Trudy Pitts, Sid Simmons, Bobby Durham, Kenny Barone, Robin and Duane Eubanks, Mickey Roker, and a long list of others whose impact has shaped his sound and perspective. His core trio for theFreedom sessions is bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer Byron Landham, with saxophonist Larry McKenna sitting in on two tracks and drummer Anwar Marshall on three. Among compositions by Philly jazz artists like Charles Fambrough and Eddie Green, the trio bangs out pieces written by Evans and Burno, thus articulating the perpetual expansion of the local jazz canon. Highlights include the rollicking piano phrases and drummer Marshall’s lively shifts and breaks on “Hodge Podge,” a piece composed by Chris Beck, and the hard-hitting swing of Duane Eubanks’ “As Is.”
