Ted Chubb – Live at The Statuary

A new release from Ted Chubb, following his highly convincing 2017 album Gratified Never Satisfied. For this live recording, captured at The Statuary in Jersey City, Chubb reunites the same lineup. He is also the club’s founder and artistic director.

Drawing on the influence of Lee Morgan, Dizzy Gillespie, Blue Mitchell, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Dorham and Art Farmer, while also acknowledging more contemporary voices such as Tom Harrell and Nicholas Payton, Chubb lays claim to a distinguished lineage. It is a formidable pantheon, and one whose melodic heritage he embraces wholeheartedly, along with, as he puts it, the blues-inflected phrasing to which he remains particularly attached.

A member of the Wallace Roney Orchestra, Chubb has also worked with Winard Harper, Christian McBride, Billy Hart, Antonio Hart, Houston Person and George Coleman. He has performed at venues including Smalls and Jazz at Lincoln Center. That, in itself, says quite a lot…

A devotee of highly melodic, even lyrical bop (Out of This World), Chubb makes full use of the instrument’s tonal texture, displaying a maturity that speaks volumes in his improvisations (Django), brilliantly supported by pianist Oscar Perezand his mastery of Latin-inflected rhythms.

Sharing the front line, alto saxophonist Bruce Williams, in particularly inspired form throughout the session, brings an extra measure of creative ingenuity, completing the quintet’s bop dialogue. The emotional charge is built entirely around this blend of fluidity and precision in the lines (Refugee Hymn) and a tightly controlled sense of fluency (Expat).

In short, this is a seasoned hard-bop quintet, thoroughly at home in the idiom, whose interpretive mastery may well now earn them a place among the leading voices of the style.