DEEP RIVER is jazz guitarist TONY QUARRINGTON's second album on the Cordova Bay label, and he wanted it to be a little different from his acclaimed 1999 recording, ONE BRIGHT MORNING. 'I was looking for a deeper, darker kind of energy,' he says, 'and more of an ensemble feel. I felt the band needed to be smaller…so I called up a great small band.' That is, the Pat LaBarbera unit that recorded VIRGO DANCE in 1986- one of TONY'S all-time favourite albums: Pat himself (recent Juno-winner, for "Deep In A Dream")playing tenor and soprano, the relentlessly swinging virtuoso Neil Swainson on bass, and the fiery Greg Pilo on drums. (Actually, the recording also featured pianist George McFetridge, who played on TONY's debut jazz recording, BLUE SKY AVENUE, in 1988.) 'These are guys that are very used to playing together, and I thought I could fit into their feel nicely. I've done a fair bit of playing with Greg, and some with Neil. Pat I'd never worked with, but I'd been studying his style for a long time.'

At first, TONY imagined the album would have no keyboards on it at all. 'I wanted to showcase how I play without a pianist. I've developed a sort of technique of accompanying my own solo lines with piano-like chord comping - an octave underneath and a bit off the beat- and that just doesn't come out clearly, if a keyboard's doing the same thing. But then I made the decision to feature the spiritual DEEP RIVER, and I thought, wouldn't a Hammond B-3 be nice on that tune? And when you think B-3, of course you think: Doug Riley! I'd just worked with him, on an album that I was producing, earlier in the year, so I called him up. And then… since he was in the studio anyway, I thought of 2 or 3 other things for him to play on.'

TONY's journey into jazz began in Toronto in the 60's, when he was a young player busy in folk, bluegrass, and rock circles. 'I'd had a little bit of exposure to jazz, from my father's records,' Tony says. 'He had quite a few Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian recordings, and most of the 50's Brubeck/Desmond sides. But then, in 1967, I moved into a Yonge St. apartment where someone had abandoned a pretty large jazz album collection. It had all the great stuff, the classic Miles, Coltrane, Wes, and a lot of Kenny Burrell/Jimmy Smith collaborations. I started listening, and my rock style started changing. The next year I was in Montreal, and I heard Sonny Greenwich. From that point, I pretty much knew where I was headed, musically.'

DEEP RIVER is, on the one hand, a highly original album - seven of the nine tunes are Quarrington compositions, and have never before been recorded - but, on the other
hand, it's a quite traditional tribute to timeless jazz forms and feelings. There are, as Tony points out, 'Two blues (one major, one minor)…a tune with the 'Rhythm' changes…a great Afro-American spiritual…a line that's based on "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise'…a rolling Latin number, sort of like "Poinciana"…a Coltrane-like fast one…a
ballad…and one standard, "Old Devil Moon". I'm trying to reflect simpler things, that have touched me deeply over the years. ONE BRIGHT MORNING was sort of designed just to say 'Hello'. This new album, I think, tells you a bit more of who I am, and what matters to me. I hope that it's a deeper spiritual statement.'

That statement begins with AURORA, a strong and somewhat dark theme for the quartet, based on the moody harmonies of "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise". 'John Coltrane recorded "Softly" a couple of times, ' Tony explains, 'and I was trying for his kind of fierce chromatic energy in what I did. And after the intro and head, it seemed appropriate to kick in a little fuzz-tone on the guitar, to help that along.' Tony's three-chorus solo comes roaring in, and is followed by Pat's big tenor, which also illustrates the legacy of Coltrane very clearly: the solos culminate in a series of intense eight-bar trades between the bass and drums.
Next, the mood becomes more serene as the quintet, with Doug Riley on Hammond B-3, investigate the spiritual DEEP RIVER. 'This is quite an old tune… I think it goes back at least to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, in the 1860's. I first heard it on a Valentine Pringle recording -he was a great bass singer- in the early'60s. It's one of those tunes - "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" is another- that I keep going back to. It's a very profound melody. I added a few chords here and there, and I've been doing it with my band for about eight years now.' There are definite echoes in this take of Canadian guitar great Sonny Greenwich, as Tony's angular, unexpected lines seek out chromatic nooks and crannies. The tune proceeds at a relaxed lope, and, after the singing guitar solo, Pat and Doug each have a stirring chorus. ' Also', notes TONY, ' Neil has a great, very melodic, little segment before the melody comes back…you know, after this take, we went into the control room to listen, and the engineer thought we had been playing the theme from 'Coronation Street'! (and, actually, the tunes are very similar, at least at the beginning.)' The words to DEEP RIVER are reproduced on the CD cover.

PRESTO PRONTO, Tony says, 'may be the oldest original tune that I still play. It's almost 20 years old now, and I remember writing it in Hamilton, while doing a club gig.
It's a unison melody: everybody plays it, including the bass- which, trust me, is not easy, though Neil makes it sound pretty easy- then we blow on Gershwin's 'I Got Rhythm'
changes, but in F rather than Bb. I think maybe this melody has a little bit of an Ornette
Coleman quality- I always really liked his tunes- and there might be some trace of John Scofield in the way I tackle the solo [I only steal from the best]. I've tried to record this song before, and somehow it never worked out too well. But we got it this time- this is a first, and only, take!' Greg Pilo plays a fine open drum solo here, before cueing the quartet back in. As the title indicates, the song moves along at quite an urgent clip.

TONY next offers a solo guitar version of the Harburg and Lane standard, "Old Devil Moon', from the show "Finian's Rainbow". (In the Fred Astaire film version, it's sung to Petula Clark by Canada's own Don Francks.) 'A guitar student of mine, Michael Moore, suggested I ought to include a solo piece on my next recording,' TONY explains, 'and, finally, I chose this song, because there's quite a tradition of doing it on piano, sometimes solo…I have great recordings, for instance, by McCoy Tyner, Jon Ballantyne, and Joanne Brackeen. I'm used to doing it in D major (because that's Doreen Smith's vocal key), and that opened up certain guitar possibilities -harmonics, and open strings- that no other key would have…I warmed up for about twenty minutes, and then I played what you hear, no edits or overdubbing. (And for a six-minute improvisation, I didn't make that many flubs.) It's a pretty challenging structure, because you can't fall back on a lot of II/V formulations. This performance brings out the particular solo style that I've developed [and when I say developed, I mean- stolen from Lenny Breau!] Also, some funny things come out, unexpected even to me: like the odd country lick, and a little quote of "Jumpin'With Symphony Sid".

OASIS was an afterthought, an extra tune brought to the studio in case there was time left over. A simple little riff-blues, it was created spontaneously by TONY on Canada Day this year, playing in a trio setting in the Oasis Lounge of the Waterloo Inn, 'where I've played Saturday nights, now, for about 8 ½ years. Jeff Bird, the bassist, called for a blues in C, and I made this up on the spot… because we were recording, I got to hear it, and write it down, afterwards. It's actually rather a dumb little line, until it goes up a half-step at the end, that's interesting, and justifies it.' The B-3 sounds particularly great in this tune, harking back to Jimmy Smith's "Chicken Shack" period, and during Neil Swainson's eloquent bass solo, TONY comps quietly behind him (sometimes using a steel guitarist's technique known as 'palm harmonics', whereby an entire six-note chord can be played with a gorgeous chime effect).

The long, moody ballad, A SNOW LIKE GRACE, composed about ten years ago, follows. Pat LaBarbera's haunting soprano sax is featured on the poignant melody, which wanders, TONY says, 'through many keys - like my ballads tend to… I think they sound natural, but at various times, you could hear this one as being in A major or minor, Cmajor or minor, and D, and E major…the title's meant to evoke some winter scenes that I remember from childhood, and the sound of the Fender Rhodes just seems so perfect here…it has the light, swirling quality of the drifting snow.' This is, again, a first take: there are gentle Lenny Breau-like guitar harmonics in the introduction, and Tony's improvisation has, perhaps, some of the deliberate and 'compositional' quality of Jim Hall, another of his musical heroes.

WINDS OF CHANGE is a mile-a-minute composition that borrows certain features of John Coltrane's writing. 'It's a lot like GIANT STEPS', notes TONY, 'except… I get the royalties! It's a 1993 tune I revamped for this session…to me it has a very joyous feel, and I like the bubbling, prolific nature of the melody that you're forced to play on these changes.' Doug Riley underlines the quickly changing harmonies on B-3, while drummer Greg Pilo contributes the driving force behind this cut's headlong momentum. Neil Swainson's bass solo moves masterfully through the lightning-quick structure.

HIBISCUS is, TONY says, 'my contribution to a certain sub-genre of jazz…Latin tunes with flower names [not tunes with names of flowers in Latin, that would be boring]…like "Poinciana", "Forest Flower", or "Fleurette Africaine"…' The sweet, sinuous theme is stated by Pat and Tony in harmony, over a background of rich bass notes, and a muted snare played with mallets. Pat solos first here, on tenor, and TONY plays two choruses that brim with odd, florid runs and sequences.

The album concludes with AXIS, sort of a bookend to the opener AURORA. It's a quick minor-key blues tune that TONY wrote, as he remembers, 'sometime in 1997, for a gig with Bernie Senensky. The melody sits really nicely on the soprano sax, which Pat chose to play… the interesting wrinkle in this arrangement is, that in everybody's first solo chorus, the bass drops out, making for a different dynamic [actually, for my first two choruses]. And, again, you can hear a bit of that comping-for-myself thing , while I'm unaccompanied. Greg plays a great 24-bar drum solo, before the final head out.'