Octo_Russ

Ron Affif [52nd Street] 

The 52nd Jazz disc in my Blog so far, and very appropriate considering the title of the album, Jazz discs appear roughly every 22 days, still quite a phenomenal minority, i now own 71 Jazz discs, and even though i bought my first Jazz album back in 1992 [20 years ago!], yet still Jazz seems to be stuck in its infancy in my life, a good Jazz album is hard to come by, i used to own 140 discs at one point, but i purged a lot of the dross, Affif falls into a genre of Jazz which is not as popular as the main two, horn based [saxophone / trumpet], and keyboards [mainly piano], also Jazz Guitar can veer towards the 'smooth' Jazz end of the spectrum, a genre that i've never warmed to, but Affif gets over any soulful doodlings of the smooth Jazz brigade, and certainly a Trio is harder to pull off, and he succeeds wonderfully.

Ron Affif is American, he's now 47, not a lot of albums to his name, this is the third album out of five, and quite possibly he's stopped recording since 1999, this album came out in 1996, the front cover shot [photo by Steve Maruta] is a nice portrait of Affif, nice and sharp, with guitar in hand, a red background which is aglow right behind him, i like colours, and the idea to put the lettering in green bands is inspired, along with the blue shirt, it makes a pleasing colourful front cover.

The tracks which i found really compelling were 1, 5, 7-8 & 10, with the very first track a superb gem [Bohemia After Dark], it's head and shoulders above everything else,