As soon as I heard the first few strains of Kevin Blancq playing It Ain’t Necessarily So, I immediately thought of Sonny Rollins. It’s just a coincidence that Kevin’s father, Charles, happens to be a celebrated musicologist, who has written extensively about Rollins. And it wasn’t exactly a comparison, but rather, Blancq made me think of something that Rollins once said about the difference between playing standards and originals. To him, the difference was, if you play only original music, chances are no one will ever know or care if you get it right or not, whereas if you louse up the melody to Stardust, you won’t be able to keep it a secret.

 Rollins could also have added, that if you play with a lot of other instruments it's easier to cover up your mistakes. (Rollins never said that as far as I know, but he lived it, being one of the first jazzmen to explore at length the horn trio without chordal instruments.) However, if you’re going to take the plunge and attempt to play and improvise upon familiar melodies in a piano-less (or guitar-less) setting, you better darn well know what you’re doing. (And if you screw up while you happen to be playing my all-time favorite song, Never Let Me Go, you’re going to have to answer to me for it.)

Ten or twenty years ago, we might have made more of the way Blancq juxtaposes compositions from widely-varying eras of jazz history - trust me, I was there when young players first started making a point of transitioning from early jazz to postbop. It’s still a commendable approach, even though it no longer has the shock value it did in the ‘80s. But if you think it’s too much of a mental shift in gears to switch from Big Butter And Egg Man, from the very beginning of Louis Armstrong’s career, to Recordame, Joe Henderson’s mature response to the bossa nova craze 40 years later, it’s because you’re thinking too much and not doing enough listening. Anyone can go for cheap thrills and make those two tunes work against each other, but Blancq pulls off the greater accomplishment of bringing them together as different entities in the same stylistic universe.

Blancq's playing reminds me, yet again, of the trumpet's versatility. I know that other players - not very many, though - have recorded in this format (particularly along the free jazz fringes) but I can’t think of any that have made it sound so good. Blancq obviously wanted to get away from the confines of a conventional chordal instrument, but at the same time he agrees with most listeners that a completely solo horn can get a bit wearying on the ear. The trumpet trio is a perfect balance, especially with personnel as talented as Robert Bowen, Geoff Clapp, and Marcello Pellitteri. This instrumentation re-establishes how versatile the trumpet actually is, from the tightly pinched squawks it makes when muted to the soaringly free sound emitted from open-belled playing. The trumpet is a demanding instrument and there are not many young men around who are playing it better.