Robert Mazurek [Badlands]And yet another disc that got airplay during the early days of my Blog [24th Janyary 2011], i picked this disc up in a second hand record shop in London for £4 i believe, and it's proved to be a supreme bargain, took me a while to really get into it, at the time i had a superb Eric Alexander disc in my possession, and he's great, so if he's on it, it must be good, the star of the show of course is Robert Mazurek, some of the best tunes on the album come from his pen.
Robert Mazurek is American, and now in his mid forties, he recorded this record in 1994-1995 on the Scottish Hep Jazz label, the front and back cover shows the two horns in close up, very nicely diagonally from each other, with excellent use of lettering inbetween, and the back cover's great too, an easy to read track list, superb layout, one of the things that attracted me to the disc in the first place.
This is quite a traditional Quintet, a Sax & Trumpet led Piano Trio, and the music is of course in the traditional of good Hard Bop, with themes and then solos, especially for the two horns, all members are inventive and very well recorded, i especially liked tracks 3, 5, 7 & 10, and these four tracks include three of the four self penned tracks by Mazurek, so certainly i like his ideas, Mazurek also uses the brittle use of a mute fairly extensively, my favourite track is the longest, the nearly 10 minute title track 'Badlands',
Here's some samples of the album from CD Universe.
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