Album Notes

Jazz is so messed-up right now!

100 years deep, jazz is being taught as a subject with so much codified baggage that it might as well fulfill a foreign language requirement instead of music credits. The Academy is mass-cloning jazz cats with no meow. They graduate more and more “players” who then plow through standards that sound as limpid as Van Morrison covers in a dive bar.

Maybe this is because the profs at joints like Berklee are oohing and aahing and patting themselves on the back for recognizing the artistic possibilities of the turntable—as though DJ Premier wasn’t scratching for Buckshot LeFonque (AKA Branford Marsalis) back in ’94.

Thank god there’s cats like Ben.

Kid goes to work. He clocks in. When I first hit the Hartford scene, his was the name I heard over and over again. Ben Golder-Novick. Ben Golder-Novick. Every gig. I started to wonder if the kid took the horn out of his mouth when he slept.

I saw him on a few hits. He flipped it with hip hop kids Missing Fifths. He honked his horn at after-work yuppies in a nondescript bar. And then there’s this. I mean the disc. "All The Things You Are” is dead-candlelight-sexy. On “Body and Soul,” listen to the way he hits that third measure. Hear that? That’s pain. Too many musicians run down that joint like it’s about giving away something they never wanted in the first place.

I’m glad you got hip to Ben. Enjoy the disc. It’s jazz played true. You don’t get that much lately.

-Dan Barry is an arts writer living in Connecticut. He first met Ben while on the beat for Local Motion, his music column in the Hartford Advocate.