Shelly Manne & His Men - Vol. 2 (1954) [Reissue 1998]

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Shelly Manne & His Men - Vol. 2 (1954) [Reissue 1998]

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Shelly Manne's second "workshop" 10" LP is even more advanced than his first, at times reaching outside the West Coast cool jazz idiom toward contemporary classical music - with no cover tunes this time. Where the first album was centered on a sax ensemble, Vol. 2 is devoted to a four-man brass group - with Russ Freeman or Marty Paich on piano and Joe Mondragon on bass - and this seems to have unleashed a wilder surge of creative freedom among Manne's six arrangers/composers. Indeed, some pieces virtually abandon jazz altogether. Bill Holman's "Lullaby" amounts to a gentle, free-flowing etude for brass and mallets, and Jimmy Giuffre's "Alternation" has no apparent key signature or steady pulse, a series of abstract proclamations colored by percussive effects. Shorty Rogers' extended "Shapes, Motion, Colors" takes off in all kinds of directions, with some straight-forward swinging portions that resemble contemporary classical music and a dialog for bass and tom-toms to close. However, Bob Cooper keeps his "Divertimento for Brass and Rhythm" swinging at all times, Marty Paich's "Dimension in Thirds" is a joyous piece loaded with brasses playing in thirds (big surprise), and Jack Montrose's "Etude De Concert" is a serious, intricate piece of work that somehow maintains a jazz feeling even when not explicitly spelling out the pulse. Manne is such a great, empathetic drummer that he is able to give most of this experimentation a solid rhythmic core on which to play.