When you play a jazz album, or parts of it, time and time again, it seems to me there are only three possible explanations: one, it presents music that coincides with your tastes, two, it is of high quality, or three, both of these apply in some combination. Three strikes me as right in explaining my repeated listening to 'Yearnings'. Five highly accomplished US musicians have produced this musical result, Bob Wilber, the energetic and needle- sharp clarinettist, saxophonist, composer and arranger (now, incredibly, in his seventies) and the sage clarinettist Bobby Gordon, from a generation later and still not well enough known. As any wind-player will attest, it would all sound desperately thin without a foundation of rhythm, chords and counterpoint, and this is provided by John Sheridan on piano, Tony De Nicola on drums and David Stone on bass. Sheridan of San Antonio is a too-little known
piano wizard who can play anything, but in particular, is the perfect band pianist, having spent the best part of two decades with the Jim Cullum Band and now freelancing. The band works through a series of tuneful numbers from the twenties, thirties and forties, plus a sprinkling of atmospheric, minorish, Wilber tunes. The disc kicks off with 'In a Little Spanish Town', with double-liquorice clarinets, and includes ' A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody', featuring sprightly Wilber horn and intriguingly idiosyncratic soloing by Bob Gordon, one of the truly original clarinet voices in classic jazz today. For me the most memorable track is 'Sunday', a wonderful tune of the Bix era, introduced with a marvellous piano lick by Sheridan, whose subsequent understated and tasteful solo is followed by Gordon with a dark chocolate meditation that demands constant replaying for its sheer delicacy and soulful content. The band gels throughout on this celebration of the present through some tunes of the past.

Recommended: Yes