Martin Speake and Ethan Iverson
MY IDEAL (SRCD 7-2)

RELEASED IN THE UK ON APRIL 26TH 2004

Tracklisting
01 Everything Happens to Me (Dennis/Adair) 5:57
02 My Ideal (Whiting/Chase/Robin) 4:14
03 What is Thing Called Love? (Porter) 4:06
04 So In Love (Porter) 4:39
05 Loverman (Davis/Ramirez/Sherman) 5:40
06 Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (Kern/Harbach) 3:05
07 Stardust (Carmichael/Parish) 3:35
08 How Insensitive (Jobim/Demoraes) 5:37
09 You Must Believe in Spring (Legrand/Demy/Bergman Bergman) 3:24
Total Time 40:40

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REVIEWS

The album was recorded at The Warehouse, in December 2002. Mastered by Ray Staff at Sony Music. Produced by Iain Ballamy. Executive Producer Christine Allen.

Martin Speake met pianist Ethan Iverson at Banff Centre for the Arts in 1990 where they both studied for a month with Steve Coleman, Kenny Wheeler, Rufus Reid, Kevin Eubanks, Stanley Cowell and others. They did not see each other again for more than ten years. Martin wondered what had happened to Ethan and found he had become the musical director of the Mark Morris Dance Company. This company visited England in 2001 and they got a chance to renew their musical friendship by playing through a few interesting standards and originals.
They hit it off musically despite being very different in their approach and decided to tour together in December 2002. Martin is known for the diversity of his projects and his interests in many areas of jazz music. This is reflected in his quartet with guitarist Mike Outram, bass Tom Herbert and Drummer Tom Skinner, Exploring Standards with Tom Skinner and Mick Hutton, free improvisation duo with drummer Mark Sanders, a duo with guitarist Colin Oxley, The Unison Quartet and a trio with sitarist Dharambir Singh and Sarvar Sabri, both of which perform Indian and Arabic influenced music, and The International Quartet with drummer Paul Motian, pianist Bobo Stenson and bassist Mick Hutton. This latter project has recently recorded for the prestigious ECM label.
"Speake's saxophone sound is a haunting mixture of fragile, silvery high-register playing and a plush, flugelhorn-like mid-range, and his momentum has an unswerving resolution of tempo. In these respects he resembles a Fifties Cool School improviser, but his phrasing represents a far more contemporary chemistry of long zigzagging lines and unexpected resolutions." John Fordham - The Guardian

Ethan Iverson is now fast becoming the piano player to watch in jazz. He has collaborated with Dewey Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Dave Douglas and Mark Turner and Billy Hart. He is now more well known for his role as pianist and composer with highly acclaimed and innovative trio The Bad Plus with David King and Reid Anderson who are signed to Columbia Records.

"Iverson is an original thinker and likely to be a very major force... implacably opposed to anything predictable, conventional or otherwise previously-done". Penguin Guide To Jazz

"If you are after some good, solid, straight-ahead jazz, then don’t look any further than Basho Music. Their latest release, 'My Ideal', is founded on a ground of softly rearranged standards, and brings together alto saxophonist Martin Speake with pianist Ethan Iverson. An elegant and intense approach to expression enhances the already stellar magnitude of these classics.

Speake’s colour is a tale of delicacy that can suddenly unravel into solidly built passages, without losing its pensive touch. On the other hand, Iverson’s nervously cerebral signature is an unrestrained ride on tempestuous waves. Even when confined to accompaniment Iverson is charged with insatiable electricity, his fingers sparkle. Scales and chords multiply like curls of baroque buildings.

A very enjoyable album". Lara Bellini, Jazz Review.com

"British alto saxophonist Speake duets with a regular Transatlantic associate, the composer and pianist Ethan Iverson - better known as one-third of the lively and now fashionable genre-breakout band the Bad Plus.
Although that full-on trio's robust irony, percussion-driven ferocity and raucous reworking of old pop hits is on another, noisier planet to these stripped-down duets exploring standards and ballads, including Michel Legrand's You Must Believe in Spring and a variety of Cole Porters, Jerome Kerns and a Jobim.

But Speake's soft tone and undemonstrative audacity found an excellent counterpoise in Iverson, who is as likely to veer off into streams of classical arpeggios as he is to play swing or stride, though he does plenty of those too.

This music was recorded in December 2002 (and produced by Iain Ballamy, no stranger to saxophone understatement) when the pair were touring the UK, and their absorbing live show is recalled by Iverson's technically-sweeping free-classical upsurge after Speake's smoke-rings on Everything Happens to Me, the duo's limping, Monkish arrangement of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and the almost sinister idling saunter of Jobim's How Insensitive. Iverson's powers are probably better revealed in these bare surroundings than they are in the Bad Plus". John Fordham, The Guardian

"Take My Ideal (Basho) by the alto saxophonist Martin Speake, 46, who as part of the sax quartet Itchy Fingers, won the 1986 Jazz Services/Schlitz competition that helped to kick-start the Eighties jazz revival. On the face of it, My Ideal is nothing special: duets of standards with the pianist Ethan Iverson from the American trio The Bad Plus. But listen again and it soon begins to stand comparison with anyone, anywhere. Speake's creamy, almost ingratiatingly melodic flights of fancy are continually brought crashing to the ground by the mad chromaticism of Iverson's piano vamps. It's ancient and modern at the same time; Beauty meets the Beast as written by Cole Porter, and then spoiled by Ornette Coleman". Phil Johnson, The Independent

"A saxophonist with an unusual turn of phrase, a persuasively gentle sound and jazz llegiances that don’t follow the usual Coltranesque paths but veer instead toward the fifties Cool School. Martin Speake is not just a distinctive improviser but a striking composer too. " John Fordham -The Guardian

"Iverson is an original thinker and likely to be a very major force... implacably opposed to anything predictable, conventional or otherwise previously-done". Penguin Guide To Jazz