Daggerboard And The Skipper - Daggerboard (2022)
Gregory Howe founded Throttle Elevator Music, a punk-flavored jazz ensemble that featured west coast sax giant Kamasi Washington. Some of those records also featured trumpeter Erik Jekabson. Those two have subsequently been recording as Daggerboard.
Here they joing forces with Henry The Skipper Franklin, a bassist described as “legendary” (whose legends I couldn’t really say, as I’d never heard of him).
What emerges is a great set of cooler-than-you-are modern jazz with some cinematic strings woven in to round out the sound. The sound is distinctive, with a sort of Henry Mancini approach that pushes at the seams between jazz and orchestral music. It swings from moody to swaggering to meditative, often inside the same track.
Nothing here is Earth-shattering but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a great statement that jazz isn’t dead.
RIYL
This one reminded me a lot of a similar approach from a band way on the other side of the Atlantic, Matthew Halsall’s Gondwana Orchestra and their magnum opus, Into Forever
