Curtis Stigers - One More for the Road

The Guardian 60

(Concord)

Jazz-rooted former pop singer Curtis Stigers has made a fine homage to Frank Sinatra’s 1966 Sinatra at the Sands album with Count Basie’s orchestra, recorded live as the original was. Stigers is much more gruff and rugged than a smoothie like Michael Bublé, as hip in his timing as Kurt Elling, if not as unpredictable – and he could hardly be in more cracking company than the Danish Radio Big Band, which catches the punchy Basie sound and the twists of Quincy Jones’s arrangements with immense aplomb. Seesawing trombone figures and ecstatically rising saxes power Come Fly With Me, Stigers slyly mimics the trumpets’ swaggering endnote shake on You Make Me Feel So Young, glides with a flute on Fly Me to the Moon and is more assertive than resigned in a bluesy, Basiesque piano company on One for My Baby. The tracks are short and the jazz breaks are few, but if this is principally a classy cover job, it’s nonetheless a sympathetic swing tribute to both Sinatra and Count Basie.