Teddy Charles

LP version. Live at the Verona Jazz Festival, 1988 is a concert recording by vibraphonist Teddy Charles and his quartet, taped on 25 June 1988 at the Teatro Romano in Verona and released by Soul Note in 1989. Charles is best remembered for the January 1956 sessions issued as The Teddy Charles Tentet on Atlantic, and for work with Charles Mingus, Mal Waldron and Miles Davis. Writing for NPR in 2012, saxophonist Brad Linde heard in the Tentet "a basis in bebop with influences from 20th-century classical music and free improvisation". Charles left music in the early 1960s to run charter boats in the Caribbean, and kept sailing alongside his playing once he was back in New York, so a festival set from 1988 is a late, uncommon document of him.

The quartet is pianist Harold Danko, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Tony Reedus, and the credits name Rudy Van Gelder as engineer. The set leans on long performances. All the Things You Ain't opens at more than twelve minutes and Walkin' follows at eleven and a half, before the short Third Levelling, under four minutes. The second half moves from To Start Again to Nostalgia for Mingus (Nostalgia in Times Square), a nod to the bassist with whom, as the NPR piece recalls, Charles had started the Jazz Workshops in the early 1950s. A twelve-minute Night in Tunisia closes the programme.

This is the original 1989 Soul Note LP, catalogue 121 183-1, with six pieces over two sides, a 140-gram copy of the first pressing that CAM Jazz, owner of the Soul Note catalogue, rediscovered in its vaults: original stock, not a reissue.