Although altoist
Michael Hashim
performs eight
Fats Waller
songs on
Keep a Song in Your Soul
plus one song (
"Two Sleepy People"
) that
Fats
helped make famous, the performances actually have nothing much to do with
Waller
other than the themes being stated. This is essentially a straight-ahead
bop
date that has
Hashim
sounding a bit like
Phil Woods
, with an occasional
Eric Dolphy
phrase tossed in. Trumpeter
Claudio Roditi
and pianist
Richard Wyands
also take several very good solos along the way. If one can forget the fact that these are
tunes, and not mind the fact that the renditions (particularly
"Fats Waller's Original E Flat Blues,"
which has the group sounding like
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers
) have no real connection to 1930s
jazz
, the date can be enjoyed. But it seems strange to revive these tunes and then do nothing with them except jam over the chord changes. ~ Scott Yanow