Geoff Gascoyne - Keep It To Yourself (2005)

The album features appearances from three special guest vocalists who Geoff performs with regularly - Jamie Cullum, whose debut album Geoff helped to produce; Georgie Fame, who he has worked with for over a decade and here Georgie repays that loyal service by bringing an original tune, 'I'll Sing You.' It is a shining jewel of a song that bristles with a tricky, hooky melody and sparkles with clever lyrics, with Geoff's wife, Australian singer Trudy Kerr. Trudy Kerr's fragile and emotive voice is showcased on the standard 'All My Tomorrows.'
Geoff Gascoyne is Jamie Cullum's bassist, and the leader of his regular band. Returning the favour Cullum turns up on two tracks here, and supplies the liner notes. But though the singer gives this set something of his familiar late-night soul-ballad spin (he sings Love Won't Let Me Wait and the Beach Boys' God Only Knows, the latter against a Gascoyne strings arrangement), and there are other guest vocalists in Trudy Kerr and the indestructible Georgie Fame, Keep It to Yourself feels like an open, if orthodox, exercise in instrumental jazzy swing, with some fine playing from pianist Tom Cawley, saxophonist Steve Kaldestad, trumpeter Martin Shaw and Gascoyne himself.
The sound of 1960s Blue Note soul-jazz hovers in the background, and Kaldestad suggests the smoky sound and leisurely pacing of that label's underrated sax master Hank Mobley on the train-rhythm hustle of Raggedy Ann or in Fame's Mose Allison cover Somebody's Gotta Move. Gascoyne's immaculate, full-bodied bass sound drives the music, and Cawley has rarely played better - both in his metallically Monkish solos (check out his playing on the fast, boppish E Flat Triangle) and in his creative prodding behind other improvisers. Fame achieves as much by insinuation as declaration on his two songs, and hangs so engagingly loosely around the beat that he seems about to fall asleep. Perhaps a bit too self-consciously a something-for-everyone set, but plenty of fine jazz for the cognoscenti.