April 2010
Jazz Journal 63 No. 4,
Brian Morton

It takes some moxie to start with a John Sebastian tune and then to programme something by Coldplay, who are to jazz favourites Radiohead what Dr Peppers is to moonshine whiskey, but Jared Gold is a confident young man and a thoroughly musical fellow who knows a strong melody when he hears it. The organist has been making a splash on the New York scene for a while now and his debut Posi-Tone CD ‘Solids And Stripes’ was one of last year’s standout organ-jazz records. Here, though, Gold doesn’t have the support of saxophonist Seamus Blake. He’s very much featured on his own, though with Ed Cherry in the line-up, there’s additional interest. The Sebastian song probably won’t ring too many bells or sound too many alarms and no sooner has it wheezed out than Gold’s own Makin’ Do lifts the rating higher still. He’s not yet a fully confident composer, with something of the tyro’s habit of messing with a simple idea in order to make it more complicated. That doesn’t necessarily work and an older and more experienced craftsman might have ironed out the extraneous detail on Times Are Hard On The Boulevard, Battle Of Tokorozawa and Home Again. In the absence of liner notes on the promo, I can’t tell you what the middle one signifies to Jared Gold, but the scrap in question was back in the 14th century, so it’s not particularly personal. I thought Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You bordered on schmaltz, but loved the Beatles tune and the sen- sitive Angel Eyes, and didn’t baulk at the Coldplay cover, which was done before I realised what it was. Gold’s good and will get better still. The bonus here is Cherry, whose own recording career seems not to have built on the high promise of his early 90s stuff on Groovin’ High, but who always delivers intelligently and with feeling. Posi-Tone is on a bit of a roll.