There’s a poignancy as well as a delight in hearing this third album by Kent-based pianist-composer Ray Guntrip and the late singer Tina May. No-one was to know in August 2021 that this would be Tina’s final recording session and that she was just weeks away from the diagnosis that would all too quickly steal her away from us.
The delight comes in hearing Tina giving the prolific Guntrip’s sometimes quirky but always easy on the ear melodies an added character of their own through both her voice and her words. When they met, in 2006, Tina had already added lyrics to music by Joe Zawinul and alto saxophonist Bobby Watson and she was about to have her collaboration with pianist Ray Bryant, which was recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio in Englewood Cliffs four years earlier, released.
As with these triumphs, Tina takes Guntrip’s tunes into her imagination and gives them compelling stories. The title track is a celebration of Paris in the days when American jazz musicians found a second home in the French capital. Titicaca salutes and almost tries to protect what would become the world’s most at risk lake in 2023, and on the suitably waltzing Daisy Dance she communes with nature enthusiastically and poetically.
All the vocal qualities Tina’s admirers recognise are here – the tonal variety, the senses of conspiracy and fun and the scatting improvisations that remind us that this was a musician who could – and did – add her clarinet playing to the Humphrey Lyttelton Band.
The band here is splendid, with carefully crafted arrangements and generous soloing space leading to superbly fluent and creative contributions particularly from Gary Barnacle (alto and tenor saxophone), Nik Carter (soprano and baritone) and Jack Birchwood, whose muted trumpet playing on Daisy Dance is beautifully judged.
Ray Guntrip himself adds both piano and Fender Rhodes solos, the latter following Carter’s baritone on Oogie in F, whose lyrics are a typical piece of May mischief that ends the album by calling to mind the Andrews Sisters, courtesy of backing vocals from Emily Hunter.
