Chris Potter and His Super Quartet
The youthful veteran saxophonist's new high-powered album (on two LPs)
The tenor saxophonist Chris Potter plays with such youthful zest, it’s startling to realize he’s been on the New York jazz scene for 35 years. He turned heads from the get-go, in 1989, at age 18, as sideman to trumpeter Red Rodney (who, in his youth 40 years earlier, had been sideman to Charlie Parker). Through the subsequent decades, Potter has played in bands led by (among many others) Paul Motian, Dave Holland, Dave Douglas, Pat Metheny, and, for a spell, Steely Dan (those were his knotty sax solos on Two Against Nature)—all the while leading his own groups, of varying sizes and styles, most of them featuring his own music.
His tone is crisp, his phrasing breezy, to the point where you might miss the sly dissonances and blazing virtuosity on first listening. (I suspect this might explain why Potter isn’t quite as highly lauded as he should be. Can music be deep, I can imagine some asking, if it goes down so easy?) Give him a few listens, and I think you’ll hear what I mean.
Eagle’s Point, his new album on Edition Records (released as a CD and a double-LP), has him fronting a genuine “super quartet”—Brad Mehldau on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Brian Blade on drums—maybe Potter’s most high-powered band since Unspoken, his 1997 breakthrough with guitarist John Scofield, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Potter was just 26 on that earlier album—20 to 30 years younger than his sidemen, though, even then, he was fearless enough to present them a playlist entirely of his compositions.
On Eagle’s Point, he does the same, though he’s now leading all-star contemporaries; except for Patitucci, who’s a dozen years his senior, they’re all roughly the same age, and it’s a more even ride—though “even” doesn’t remotely mean “bland.” The players are all masters, and, while they don’t engage here in much bravura (for the most part, they paint “inside the lines”), the strokes, colors, and details—Mehldau’s sparkling touches and grace notes, Patitucci’s unchained anchor, Blade’s syncopated klook-a-mops, Potter’s buoyant swirls, and their seamless interplay—are a pleasure to behold.
The one exception is the title track, which has the whiff of a funky blues—not the specialty of any of these musicians, separately or together. But this is an outlier.
John Davis recorded the session at Brooklyn’s Bunker Studio, using a Neumann U47 mic on the sax (adding a U67 when Potter switched to bass clarinet), a pair of Neumann M49s on the piano (with Royer 121 ribbons on the hammers), another M49 for the bass (adding an SM2 stereo mic for air and space), and a mix of Neumanns, AKGs and Shures for the drumkit. Room ambience was covered by a pair of Geffel MV-102 (small-diaphragm tube omnis), with a little bit of reverb supplied by EMT140 plates and a Bricasti M7. The results were laid down to 2” analog tape on a Studer A800 at 15 ips with Dolby SR; taken through a Neve 8088 console; then to 96/24 ProTools for editing and final mixing (on an API Legacy AXS).
The results, as you might expect, are pretty stunning—warm, sharp, fine detail, wide dynamics, 3D imaging, plenty of air. This is much more the case with the two-disc LP (mastered by Alex DeTurk, cut at Record Industry in the Netherlands) than with the CD.
