There’s a lot of fantastic bassoon music out there, these days. Admittedly, some of it is interesting more for bassoonists themselves. However, you may be surprised to find that quite a bit of it may interest a much wider audience than just us double reed nerds.
For instance, there’s the new jazz album, “Frolic in the Land of Plenty”, by jazz bassoonist Paul Hanson, released earlier this year. Yeah – jazz bassoonist.
Let me be clear what we’re talking about, here. This isn’t some novelty where a well meaning player attempts a few blues scales, but ends up sounding like a bassoonist “just trying” to do jazz. This guy absolutely rocks. I mean he’s good. He’s got jazz chops that would embarrass some decent sax players. For that matter, he’s got bassoon chops that make a lot of bassoonists go weak in the knees. He does stuff on the bassoon that you might have previously said was impossible, like playing complicated licks in the high register like it’s easy. Furthermore, when you hear him play, it quickly becomes apparent that Hanson is actually a gifted jazz player who just happens to play the bassoon – not the other way around.
Some of the tracks actually take “Frolic” beyond even jazz bassoon. For this album, he amplifies, processes, loops, and layers the bassoon, achieving results that are fairly astounding. Tracks like this include the title track, “Frolic in the Land of Plenty”, a real moody sounding groove, and the arabic sounding “Subtle Deamons”, which, besides flat out kicking, features some downright nasty amplified bassoon effects. At points in both of these tracks, you can hear the bassoon filling in the background, interjecting some counterpoint and echoes, as well as providing the melody, although if you don’t listen close, you may not recognize the sound of the heavily processed bassoons, at all. Hanson outdoes himself with these two tracks, which are my personal favorites on the album.
The rest of the album spans the gamut from some pretty driving tracks like “Emerald Mile”, to the late night sounding “Sacred Love”, to the very different but fun “Flight of the Fly”. Throughout the album, two things are always noticeable: First, the band backing Hanson is top notch, and really tight, including the venerable drummer Dennis Chambers, who provided the drums on some of the tracks. Second, this is just great jazz music, period. The fact that the lead instrument is a bassoon quickly becomes unimportant, due to Hanson’s talents as a jazz player.
“Frolic in the Land of Plenty” is a great album. Anyone who enjoys good driving jazz should definitely check it out. I’ve provided a few links below to let you sample the album for yourselves. Or, you can click on the album cover to go to Amazon’s MP3 page. Let me know what you think!
Full length tracks on Lala:
(The Lala service requires you to sign up first, but it’s completely free to do so and very quick. Once you sign up, you can listen to any track in its entirety once for free. In my opinion, being able to listen to the entire track is much cooler than a 30 second sample, so I’ll probably continue to provide links like this whenever possible.)
Also, be sure to check out Paul Hanson’s website.
UPDATE: Link to his website updated to reflect his new site. Thanks to Hanson for stopping by my blog, and letting me know!