Imagine a musician who was totally immersed in his craft. Imagine that person setting down his instrument for 45 years. All of those decades away (and I'm sure Mort is tired of hearing about this story), all of that bad living. A reasonable person might think that attempts at a return to music-making would result in either a sad, watered-down facsimile of a former career or a puffy, nostalgia-filled look back. The story did not end that way for Mort Weiss. Collaborations with guitarist Ron Aschete and B3 legend Joey DeFrancesco were similarly stunning.
On Raising The Bar, Weiss puts his solo clarinet directly into the spotlight. The results are anything but cliché', presenting a musician confident in his abilities and in love with jazz.
Let's look at the program first, because this is no set of easily digested swing tunes. There gorgeously-rendered jazzified pop standards ("Tea For Two," "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing," "Alfie," "Smile"), jazz classics ("Just Friends," "Sketches, "My Shining Hour"), and some intriguing original material.
The approach that Weiss takes on some of these selections is to take the melodic and harmonic content and explore it's implications. By this, I don't mean that he starts out in the usual manner, presenting the melody and then slowly taking it in different directions. Instead, the destination is often presented early on, with the music working it's way back to more "normal" (read: familiar) confines. Give the classic "Just Friends" a listen. Ideas splatter all over the place as you begin to think "Hmmm...wait, I know this....do I?" Just when you really do begin to doubt yourself, the fog clears and that old friend really does show up. On other songs, Weiss takes a more "traditional out" (Hey, I just made an oxymoron!) tack by laying out the tune before visiting the harmonic possibilities of each phrase. It's both respectful and exhilarating.
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