Ran Blake, Houston Person

LP version. Suffield Gothic is a mostly solo piano album by Ran Blake, recorded at Vanguard Studios in New York on September 28 and 29, 1983 and released by Soul Note in 1984. On four of its nine tracks Blake is joined by the tenor saxophonist Houston Person, a player from the soul jazz and organ combo world: in The Audio Beat Kevin Whitehead notes the many singers and jazz organists he backed.

Blake had taught at the New England Conservatory since 1967 and chaired its Third Stream programme since 1972, the term coined by his mentor Gunther Schuller, and his solo playing draws on gospel, film music and popular song as much as on jazz. The session was recorded by David Baker, produced by Giovanni Bonandrini with Greg Silberman, and annotated by Bob Blumenthal and J.R. Taylor. The album is dedicated to Mother Carter of the Church of God in Christ in Hartford, to Blake's mentors Richard and Margaret Gummere and to the film director Jacques Tourneur, "a master of depicting the past", as the dedication on Blake's own website puts it. Person plays on Curtis, which opens the album, Vanguard, Indian Winter and the closing Midnight Local To Tate County. The solo tracks draw on familiar material: Pete Kelly's Blues, There's Been A Change In My Life, Old Man River, a Tribute To Mahalia that joins Walk Over God's Heaven, It Don't Cost Very Much and Silent Night, and even Stars And Stripes Forever. Writing in 2023, Whitehead called the meeting with Person "an unlikely but effective 1983 pairing" on what he described as Blake's otherwise solo gem.

This is a copy of the original 1984 Soul Note LP, catalogue number SN 1077, on 140 gram vinyl: CAM Jazz, which now owns the label, describes it as original stock recently found in its vaults.