Frank Rosolino & Conte Candoli - Just Friends (Live) (2016) [Hi-Res]

This album continues the quintet’s exciting impromptu dialogue at Munich’s Domicile jazz club, as the band plays classic jazz standards with a drive and exuberance indicative of the onstage comradery. Stella By Starlight is taken at a bright tempo with stellar solos by Candoli and Rosolino. Isla Eckinger’s masterful solo demonstrates why he is one of Europe’s outstanding bassists, and Frank and Conte trade dazzling eight and four bar passages before playing the theme out. The quintet maintains a scintillating tempo on Just Friends, and keeps the heat up on There Is No Greater Love. Thelonious Monk’s classic Well You Needn’t is played up-tempo. Rosolino and Candoli fluently maneuver their way through the changes, while pianist Rob Pronk tips his hat to Monk’s pianistic magic. There’s some incendiary four bar exchanges between the horns and drummer Todd Conedy on the 16 bars before the last theme. Jobim’s bossa Quiet Nights morphs into incandescent swing, while the band transforms the ballad My Funny Valentine into an infectious hard-swinging letter of love to the art of improvisation. Critic Mike Hennessey called the album “Carefree relaxed and rip-roaring jam session music at its spontaneous best”. That fits.

Frank Rosolino, trombone
Conte Candoli, trumpet
Rob Pronk, piano
Isla Eckinger, bass
Todd Canedy, drums

Recorded May 1975 at Domicile Jazz Club in Munich, Germany

Digitally remastered