Ten years in, McCarthy isn’t hunting through anyone else’s songbook anymore — he’s started his own.
Chris McCarthy Music
Chris McCarthy – piano, composition; Takuya Kuroda – trumpet; Eden Bareket – baritone saxophone; Sam Minaie – bass; Steven Crammer – drums; Vanisha Gould – vocals
There’s a version of the Great American Songbook that never got written, and on Too Late To Quit, pianist Chris McCarthy sounds like he may have found it in a drawer somewhere. Eight originals move through this record with the ease of songs that have been around for decades, McCarthy’s compositions doing that rare thing where they feel both familiar and entirely his own. It’s his fifth album as a bandleader, and after a decade of playing other people’s standards, he’s started writing his own.
Trumpet and piano open “Curtain Call” in a circling, repeating pattern, the sax stepping into the same swirl before Vanisha Gould’s voice rises out of it, settling into a relaxed swing, mid-range. It sounds tailored to her, as though McCarthy wrote it with her phrasing already in his ear, and along with “As If,” both tunes could pass for old American standards. “After All” sounds like it belongs with them, Gould flicking vibrato onto the ends of her phrases like she’s playing a part.
The band gets its own say too. “Overnight Excess” has the baritone sax and trumpet batting phrases back and forth before trading conversational solos. After the piano takes its turn both horns circle it before heading back to where they started. “Insomnia Waltz” opens on a dreamy vocal before the horns come in, Kuroda throwing his notes out in bursts, bunched together like he’s still working on what to say. Piano and sax gather the bursts up and run with them. Gould’s voice waltzing back in to close it out.
McCarthy switches to electric piano on “Tuck and Draw,” a funkier detour with a steady bass line, clicking drums, and a trumpet solo that’s all casual confidence, a few high notes tossed out just because he can. “MTA” turns stranger — low piano notes on repeat, bird-like sounds from baritone sax, trumpet smearing notes, and Gould humming over it before starting to sing. The piano solos with countermelodies running between both hands, before Kuroda cuts in with a bright, in-your-face solo, and Gould comes back singing. Dissonance creeps in near the end, maybe an echo of those bird sounds from the opening — hard to say if the song means to end unresolved, or just does.
“Sonder” closes the album sounding almost mournful. There’s a touch of melancholy in the bowed bass lines. The trumpet enters serious and forceful while the band seems to float off that bass line, freer than anywhere else on the record, everyone doing their own thing quietly in their own corner, and somehow still together.
Ten years in, McCarthy isn’t hunting through anyone else’s songbook anymore — he’s started his own.
