TAB Collective - Back In Town (2021)

The TAB Collective comes around the corner in a musically informal way. The musical start of the CD is as casual as the CD title Back in town. You almost get out of the taxi with the first number and are in a sound world of warm grooves between soul and jazz. The TAB Collective, consisting of a quartet (partly expanded to a quintet) and a female and a male singer, does not even want to reinvent a genre, but rather plays 10 tracks (+1 radio edit) that are emphatically atmospheric and accessible. The music tells stories in different colors, the CD cover is a reference to this narrative attitude. And yet the musicians enter quite different terrain: sometimes tasty with string arrangements, as in Where do we go from here or with reminiscences of Stevie Wonder in Civility. Or At Midnight, which is characterized by stride piano echoes and drive, with a counter pool in the ballad In your way. But seldom has music from our country been so internationally oriented. The reasons lie in the details of the production. The album stages two great vocalists: Pat Appleton, who lives in Berlin with Liberian roots and is a seasoned soul & jazz singer, and Ken Norris, who came to Hamburg from the USA via Paris and teaches there as a professor of jazz singing. Both complement each other vocally and can bring out their timbre wonderfully with a high recognition value. And both sing with radiance and interpretative subtlety, embedded in a great band consisting of Roland Neffe (vibes), Tino Derado (piano), Andreas Lang (bass) and Emanuel Hauptmann (drums). Radio Promotion: Merret Levermann PR