In future years, Emmet Cohen should always be remembered as the ebullient jazz musician whose online performances during Covid, live from his Harlem apartment, raised our spirits and almost vanquished our lockdown blues.
But now, with this album recorded early in January, 2024, it’s Cohen’s turn to remember Michael Funmi Ononaiye (1968-2023). Ononaiye was the chief programmer for Jazz At Lincoln Center, a distinguished figure in the U.S. jazz universe and one of the instigators who drove Cohen’s impressive effort during the epidemic. Cohen notes that this album, Vibe Provider, “serves as a heartfelt dedication to our dear brother… it’s a rare privilege to encounter a human being with such an unmistakeable forcefield of hope and optimism radiating around them.”
But then Emmet Cohen himself is no stranger to radiating hope and optimism. An enthusiastic jazz omnivore with fearsome technique and creativity, he has absorbed and re-interpreted multiple influences and styles from all phases of jazz development, all to be heard on track one featuring his trio with Philip Norris on bass and Kyle Poole on drums, performing Cohen’s original composition Lion Song, an attractive melody with a refreshing lilt of ragtime delicacy.
Then the trio tackles Surrey With A Fringe On Top (one of the few Hammerstein and Rodgers’ songs to graduate as jazz standards) reminding us how top-level jazz musicians share precision, poise, timing and response with top-level athletes, excepting for the fine whole-tone embellishments.
On the title track, Cohen’s funky Vibe Provider, the trio is augmented by tenor saxophonist Tivon Pennicott, trumpeter Bruce Harris, trombonist Frank Lacy and also Cecily Petrarca on koshkah (since you ask, an African musical instrument featuring a couple of small calabashes connected at both ends by ropes), who introduce the call-and-response theme with its angular hook after Norris’s repeated bass figure intro. Listen how carefully Pennicott crafts an out-of-tempo statement before spreading his considerable chops across the entire range of the horn before the irrepressible leader ignites keyboard fireworks and Harris’s breathless trill in the stirring finale.
Unblock The Love (according to Cohen, these three words were among Michael Funmi Ononaiye’s last) is a sinuous bossa nova with trumpet and tenor sounding a theme of love and loss, then an understated passage from the pianist introduces Pennicott’s intense tenor, complemented at the finale by Harris, tightly muted, a faraway echo of early 50s Miles Davis.
A trio reassembles, now with Joe Farnsworth on drums, for Henei Ma Tov, a brooding version of a traditional Hebrew melody, introduced by Cohen’s pizzicato plucking of the piano’s strings. ‘Yip’ Harburg and Burton Lane’s If This Isn’t Love is an engaging melody from the successful Broadway show Finian’s Rainbow, engagingly performed. Taken at a rapid lick, each trio member displays faultless skill and integration, with never a foot or finger fault. Everlasting starts as a gentle ballad by Cohen handled with delicacy and feeling and a total absence of sentimentality. When it shifts into swinging, the mighty combination of Norris’s bass with Farnsworth’s brushes turbo charges Cohen’s expressive solo.
Time On My Hands was written by Harold Adamson, Mack Gordon and Vincent Youmans for Smiles, a 1930 show that closed like a rat trap soon after opening. The song, however, has enjoyed a longer life and the trio (Kyle Pool returns to the drum kit) begin by passing deconstructed melody fragments back and forth like seasoned basketball stars. The treatment is soft, but spirited, displaying a blending of economy and elegance particularly with fat block chords over Norris’s bass, even inserting a flashy quote from Duke Ellington’s Rockin’ In Rhythm seconds before the finish.
The final track is Emmet’s Blues, an up-tempo riffy 12-bar romp with Farnsworth, Pennicott, Harris, and Lacy returning to say their pieces, ending a praiseworthy album on a high note.
Recording engineer Todd Whitelock did a fine job on the sound and the album was produced by Emmet Cohen and Kyle Poole. A memorable tribute to the late Michael Funmi Ononaiye. R.I.P.
Vibe Provider is released on 23 August 2024.
