On Holy Thursday, some seventy souls gathered at JazzOn Aretoa, the headquarters of the Bilbaína Jazz Club, located in Bilbao La Vieja, to testify to the quality of the young (29 years old!) trumpeter and vocalist (it’s a shame he didn’t sing this Thursday… ) from Eugene, Oregon, but based in New York, Tony Glausi, a very attractive guy: slim, tight clothes, colored vest, pointed toe shoes, as handsome as Manu Carrasco (ruddy, beard…), sexy (his shirt unbuttoned) and with a certain aura of sadness that may be explained based on the origin of the repertoire he played, 7 pieces in 109 minutes (discounting the 17 intermission would be 92 minutes) of music composed last year, during the depression that caused him to break the lip in July and spend six months without being able to play the trumpet.
Tony Glausi, “a boom in recent years”, as the rector of the club Gorka Reino introduced him, performed in a fluent quartet and knowledgeable of the repertoire noted in sheet music. A combo that was more than the sum of its high-level parts: Xavi Torres on piano (he had a lot of lead as a soloist, vivacious, avant-garde -excuse me- and bluesman), Rubén Carles on double bass (very cool shirt, similar to actor Stanley Tucci and fleshy at all times, so much so that we came to think that he was the best bassist we have ever seen in our lives; except perhaps for the Israeli Avishai Cohen, although Carles was superior to maestro Ron Carter, let no one take it as disrespectful) and Pier Bruera (the most discreet in his task, however outstanding?).
Torres, Glausi, Carles and Bruera in the ballad ‘Natalia’
EITHER. bucket
Thursday’s was a beautiful date, exciting and up and down, not ups and downs. We went with high expectations, and we left satisfied and happy, even if we lacked some sung bolero and some Latin shrillness. Tony Glausi intervened as a modernist neo-traditionalist (a student of Wynton Marsalis, but less tied to the canons and more of an explorer of the infinite), and in his sincere, talented and, as has been said, well-ventilated and greased quartet intervention, today’s New York neighbor he suggested ‘Summertime’ before getting carried away by swing (‘Restoration’), and united it with a malarial, exotic and sumptuous fragment a la ‘Porgy & Bess’ with Dizzy Gillespie antics (‘Tendency’).
The drama emerged in the ballad ‘Natalia’, with traces of the first Sinatra, the adolescent idol, and arranged with certain Morricone-style boasts, and the first pass ended with the blues of broken emotion and classicism Roy Eldridge entitled ‘New mantra’ . How good the entire first pass had sounded, what body and cadence that of the double bass, what a co-protagonism that of the piano and what just vigor that of the drums. And the mystery of the trumpeter’s troubles was unraveled in the first two pieces of the second part, ‘Still blue’ (still depressed), a blues that, born of ragtime, leaked trumpet pecks as if blown by the always ecstatic Louis Prima, and ‘Decay’ (decay), with a leading piano to the point of Chopinesque, to the twinkle of post-rock, and with a very Chet Baker trumpet, as was the pose adopted by Tony, leaning on the piano, when Xavi Torres played it as a soloist .
How beautiful everything. In the highly requested encore they played the only piece not presented in his perfect Spanish by the Oregon trumpeter, the only version, the standard ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ (his admired Miles Davis did it), in a very fast bop revision. At the end there were no records to sell (they had run out before arriving in Bilbao, on this premiere tour of this repertoire, of this ‘suite’ as its author defined it) and then Tony Glausi revealed to us the secret of why he speaks so well Spanish: «I like to learn…, and I had a girlfriend from Soria for seven months».