One

By Larry Taylor
Published in All About Jazz: June 16, 2011

It’s a pleasure to discover a jazz performer. whose style is unique. Pianist Clifford Lamb is in this category as he displays in One.

The opener, Miles Davis’ classic “All Blues,” for example, features a meditative, mesmerizing duo with Belcher. It starts with the bass playing the well known melodic riff in the background and Lamb improvising over it. He is quoted as saying that he imagines Davis suspended in the universe, his life on earth spent: “The bowed single note [played at the end] is like an infinite and unchanging sound contrasted by the piano restlessly yet slowly moving in contrast…”— a lofty but appropriate description.

Highlights include the Comden/Green standard, “Just in Time,” which starts with an infectious start/stop pattern before drummer Green comes in impressively. In “A Portrait of Eleanor Rigby,” the Beatles’ story of a woman’s loneliness is given a cubist stroke, a Picassoesque fragmentation of the well known melody .

Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” shows off Lamb’s creativity, unaccompanied. It starts with a seeming search for the melody. As on “Rigby,” he gives bits and pieces. Finally, with a witty bridge from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the refrain comes across fully.

Track Listing: All Blues; Just In Time; People; Red and Blue; A Potrait of Eleanor Rigby; Fotographia; Well You Needn’t; Baby Plum.