Nat's Men Of Steele Power-Up With Oodles Of Jazz-Life Pep

It’s often said that the male of the species cannot multi-task. Try telling that to Nat Steele, vibes player and leader of his MJQ quartet, who not only performed on his groups’ current tour, with ace US tenorist Grant Stewart, but found the venues, sorted the paperwork, badgered the ACL for funding, drove the van, designed the publicity, booked the dates... you know the rest. Two full-time jobs in one, you could say. Wearying, maybe, demanding certainly, but on the evidence of this stirring gig, absolutely justified and wholly worthwhile.

With 17 engagements in 14 days, the word exhausting might also come to mind, but again the desire to play and the sheer creativity on offer made this seem like a totally fresh encounter. Stewart, Canadian-born but for long a fixture in New York, has both authority and presence as he plays. No notes wasted, a veering towards the lower register and happily free of the need to strive for effect, he eschews the inconsequential, each improvisation built from the ground up, the tone thick and woody. All-in-all, a complete player sans histrionics. If this suggests an affinity to early Rollins or, at times, Zoot Sims with added heft, that’s fine.   

In fact, this tour was predicated on a desire to re-play the MJQ’s original collaboration with Sonny Rollins (Prestige, 1953), but as Steele explained there were only four pieces on that album, so the repertoire here was inevitably more wide-ranging – everything from ‘Django’ to ‘Luminescence’ by Barry Harris, via the ‘The Stopper’ (this actually from the 1953 recording). Steele’s link to Milt Jackson is well-known, but that’s not to short-change his creative brilliance, or pianist Gabriel Latchin’s wonderful feeling for Powell-esque bebop piano, his fluency equally assured on up-beat numbers or ballad. Substitute bassist Luke Steele, brother to Nat and an engineer by day, stepped in and was superb, powering the rhythm section in cahoots with drummer Steve Brown, up on his toes for this gig and reveling in the chance to show his complete command of hard-bop drums.  

Here was a truly stellar all-round performance: stop-time chords, neat turnarounds, valid interchanges, nimble adjustments – all jazz life was here. Consider the rather unlikely ‘After You’ve Gone’, with Stewart in tearaway form, vibist Nat building well over the drum breaks or ‘Stairway To the Stars’, included because they heard it and liked it on the car coming in, with another of bassist Luke’s hard-swinging solos. A band like this is rare these days; applause all round for them, and for club proprietor Nigel Price, too.