Veteran trumpeter Derrick Gardner took his long-standing Jazz Prophets sextet on a five-week tour through the West African country of Ghana last summer. The trip provided the inspiration and thematic basis for the band’s current release,
Pan Africa.
There’s little aural evidence, however, of concrete African influence in the album’s nine tracks, five of which were composed by Gardner. If anything, the music is rooted in American hard bop, employing mostly swing-based rhythms and a head/solos/head orthodoxy.
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with a 57-year-old, Chicago-raised, New York-based horn player shaping his African influences into a Western mold and christening it
Pan Africa. But the title certainly suggests that the listener is in for something more adventurous and innovative, something more representative of the African diaspora than another post-bop record in the mold of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. The album’s African-themed titles — “Highlife Suite,” “Assin Manso … The Last Bath,” “Nkrumah ’da Rulah” — simply aren’t enough to connect the dots.
There are trappings here and there. The album’s most overtly African selection is the opener, “Djemba Kan,” a short solo piece performed on the African
djembe drum by Kweku Sumbry, who plays drum kit and hand drums on the rest of the record. That vignette gives way to a brassy fanfare that signals the onset of Jackie McLean’s “Appointment in Ghana.” Gardner’s band performs the tune similarly to the 1959 original, ushering us into decidedly post-bop territory. That’s where, by and large, the record stays.
Pan Africa’s most successful tracks are the handful that employ a mixture of trap and hand drums, especially “The Sixth Village,” with its rolling, Afro-Cuban groove. For his solo, Gardner barrels out of the gate with a searing, brassy phrase that illustrates his enthusiasm for Louis Armstrong. Robert Dixon, on tenor sax (he also plays alto), and trombonist Vincent Gardner, Derrick’s brother, follow with similarly spirited forays.
“Blues for the Diaspora” is built on a slow, sleazy swing that evokes a New Orleans feel. The tune may not sound African, per se, but at least there’s an African connection. —
Eric Snider https://open.spotify.com/album/3ry4Xsqqf9jl2syXgWuCM0?si=o8KwvySwRiai_XVOEdAnog
