![]() I got to meet the ebullient Steve Pikal on my recent Nashville trip, and he’s a wonderful creation: you can’t tell where he stops and where the music begins, or, put it this way, his unwavering good humor, expressed in a nearly perpetual smile, comes right through his string bass. He plays himself, and that’s a wonderful thing. stands out as a gifted inventor of long spinning lines, someone whose rhythm playing rocks. In a landscape of guitarists who sound fraternally similar, young Mister J.C. I’d like to hear a Dan Walton solo or duo CD, and hope that this idea can be realized soon. His solo work is quiet but it rings in the mind his ensemble playing is just the thing, and his boogie-woogie sounds real. He’s absorbed all the great styles and recordings, but - thank heavens - he isn’t on the planet to play them note-for-note unless requested. ![]() Like the rest of this band, he never plays a formulaic or dull note or phrase. SWING CENTRAL is the doctor-tested remedy for audiences shrinking because of dulling sameness. As he says on the video, he was moved to create SWING CENTRAL as a band that could play “Chicago style,” but was earnestly connected to the delicate heartfelt traceries of clarinetists Lester Young, Pee Wee Russell, Frank Chace, among others: which leads me to the bold statement that (aside from the one evocation of Charlie Christian on this set) NO OTHER BAND SOUNDS LIKE THIS.įestival promoters, please take note. Hal also has a capacious imagination: he can most effectively put together a band devoted to Kid Ory, or the Watters-Scobey-Murphy world, but he really likes supercharged small groups that float and fly, and he’s got a long list of such groups with many wonderful recordings. If you put on a CD (or “record”) in another room that started with eight bars of Hal’s hi-hat, I would a) know who it was before the passage was over b) be smiling c) put down whatever I was doing in the other room to come closer to the speaker to soak in the swing. From the top, borrowing Eddie Durham’s words about Ed Hall, “Hal Smith doesn’t know how to not swing,” which means to me that his beat is irrresistible. In this set, they play WAY DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS DON’T LEAVE ME, DADDY CHINA BOY SWEET IS THE NIGHT WHOLLY CATS I WANT A LITTLE GIRL BEAT ME, DADDY, EIGHT TO THE BAR LESTER LEAPS IN.Ī few words about the band and its delightful repertoire, or maybe more than a few. The members of this compact swinging ensemble are Jonathan Doyle, clarinet Dan Walton, piano / vocals Jamey Cummins, guitar Steve Pikal, string bass Hal Smith, drums / leader. I was not able to make it to hear / see / video SWING CENTRAL at the BixFest, but fortunately “jazzmanjoe” caught a set, with nice sound. Here is what I wrote about it on the occasion of its debut CD, whose nifty cover is pictured below. ![]() Even though it’s been in existence only a short time, SWING CENTRAL, the beloved brain-and-heart child of drummer and inspiration man Hal Smith, is one of my favorite bands.
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