Juan Canosa – You Are My Everything

The perfect tone, precise and measured, with exactly the right amount of breadth: that is the great challenge of playing trombone. Juan Canosa excels at it in a recording built around a selection of great standards, where the slightest misjudgement of breath could easily sound out of place. Here, quite the opposite happens.

Trombonist Juan Canosa, who also occasionally takes up the tuba and euphonium, is a composer and arranger as well as a leading figure on Argentina’s jazz scene. A familiar presence on the Buenos Aires jazz circuit, as are the musicians accompanying him here, he normally leads his own quintet, where the trombone sometimes shares the choruses with pedal steel guitar.

He has also taken part in the musical adventures of a strand of Argentine hard bop that remains relatively little known at our latitudes, alongside such highly regarded players as trumpeter and flugelhornist Sergio Wagner, pianist Santiago Belgrano and trumpeter Juan Cruz de Urquiza. All musicians whose work, incidentally, I would strongly recommend seeking out.

For this recording, Canosa appears in a more traditional quintet setting, with the addition of saxophonist Gustavo Musso, himself one of the rising figures of Argentine jazz. The program is built around a series of standards that have entered the jazz canon, with our trombonist occasionally stepping up to the microphone as a singer as well.

I particularly like the wonderfully silky, restrained phrasing in the instrument’s middle register on his reading of You Are My Everything, followed, in a darker register, by an equally smooth and thoroughly lyrical treatment of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

The quintet delivers a form of jazz that may not spring many surprises, but it has the considerable merit of introducing us to a little-known corner of the Argentine jazz scene, through musicians who receive far too little attention, if any, on our side of the Atlantic. The arrangements are carefully executed and the trombone’s tone is perfectly controlled throughout.

It is also an opportunity to revisit some of the most heavily played standards in the repertoire and, along the way, catch a hint of some new colour that deserves to be called rediscovery rather than yet another reinterpretation (Darn That Dream). In that respect, Let’s Get Lost is another track not to be missed, with the horns presenting the theme in enharmonic harmony before the saxophone takes up the counterline. A real gem!

A record, too, to make those who still think the trombone is little more than an instrument for going pom-pom-pom reconsider their assumptions….