Mike Tucker

Though only 26 years old, tenor saxophonist Mike Tucker has been performing for over a decade, both in and around his native Boston and around the world. This is his debut as a leader, and it bodes very well for a long and productive career. Tucker has achieved something very unusual in jazz: he plays in a style that is fully developed and clearly his own, and yet he never sounds iconoclastic or willfully rebellious. He writes beautifully as well, and there's a similarly paradoxical blend of tradition and modernism in his compositions. You hear it most clearly on "Fanfare," the album's opening track, which has its roots deep in the bop verities but brings in chord changes that owe much to the innovators of the 1960s as well. On "Kathy" the chord progression is more slippery and impressionistic, while "The Hey Man Tenor Club" brings back a more straight-ahead structure but strikes a delicate balance between its brisk tempo and a certain cool dispassion. "New Orleans" starts out appropriately funky and loose-limbed, but then abruptly shifts into a charging bop rhythm; "Double Mambo" struts in 7/8 time, and the aptly titled "Space Suite" finds him stretching out in a slightly self-indulgent, fusion-inflected mode, complete with wanky Joe Zawinul-style keyboards courtesy of Leo Genovese. Apart from the slightly out-of-tune playing on "Mbira," that's as close as Tucker gets to a misstep on this very impressive album. Highly recommended. ~ Rick Anderson, Rovi