A Debut Release From a Seasoned Duo
Aurora Nealand and Tom McDermott are a New Orleans phenomenon who play Buffa’s on Esplanade Avenue every Thursday. They usually begin their opening set improvising over the Buster Keaton silent film masterpiece, “One Week.” Whenever I’m asked to advise on a NOLA itinerary for travelers, I always suggest they be there on Thursdays to catch this amazing duo. But until last week, all you could take home from their shows was a memory, or a quick refresher in the form of a few YouTube clips. Here with Aurora on soprano saxophone they play the New Orleans standard, “Just a Little While to Stay Here.”
Now, thanks to a couple of NOLA music mavens from Northampton, MA, Jerry Smolin and Paul Duval, this remarkable pair of musical polymaths is finally on the record. City of Timbres features fourteen songs that filter the musical traditions of Louisiana, Argentina, Brazil, the Caribbean and West Indies through the sensibilities of pianist McDermott and the multi-reedist/vocalist Nealand. A multiplicity of themes are at play here, not least the city by the Mississippi, which was a motif on Nealand’s previous release with her band The Royal Roses, The Lookback Transmission. The sound of rippling waters precedes that set’s opener, Nealand’s “Ferryman,” and flows through to its end, Jimmie Rodgers’s “Miss the Mississippi and You.” The Big Muddy laps at the edges of this set too, from “La Nouvelle Orleans” (Hoagy Carmichael’s “New Orleans,” sung in French by Sarah Quintana), Sidney Bechet’s “Tropical Mood,” and the boat whistle that introduces “Mississippi Dreamboat.”
McDermott’s website provides this expert commentary on the material; John Swenson’s laudatory review appears here in Off Beat.
I’ve written about Tom and Aurora on a couple of previous blogs. Click here for last year’s New Orleans Journal, and here for my first report on the duo. We’ll hear a handful of titles from City of Timbres in tonight’s Jazz a la Mode. Here at Buffa’s, Tom and Aurora play “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” which they also perform on City of Timbres.