The Waiting Game by Mike Nock & Marty Ehrlich

18 Mar

Written by Lee Prosser
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The extremely versatile New Zealand-born pianist Mick Nock has kept a somewhat low profile over the past 10 years or so. For those not hep to the jive, this Nock guy played with Yusef Lateef, Tal Farlow, John Klemmer and the proto-Fusion band The Fourth Way. New Yorker Marty Ehrlich is an in+out player/composer who's known as a leader and performing/recording with Bobby Previte, John Carter and George Russell. This is a duo set, where both cats indulge in some of the most ravishingly warm & tuneful jazz, free of syrupy sappiness and self-absorbed twaddle, the kind they don't hardly make no more. Most of the tunes are Nock's or Nock/Ehrlich, except "Snowy Morning Blues" by James P. Johnson and Dave Brubeck's affectionate Ellington portrait "The Duke."

Virtually all the tunes have one thing in common: the beguiling humanistic quality of classical jazz tunesmiths, like Monk, Armstrong, Ellington, Gil Evans, Paul Desmond and yes, Bobby Previte and Keith Tippett and the more jazz-oriented Great American Songbook guys: Mercer, Berlin & Carmichael. Nock sticks to the acoustic piano (many shades to his playing), Ehrlich plays alto & soprano sax, straight clarinet & bass clarinet (on-the-money). Both have a rhapsodic approach, to tender ballads and more "loose-form"/abstract pieces, making this particular WAITING GAME a particularly enchanting musical companion.