Chris Garrick: Flight Mode – review

Violinist Chris Garrick has a classical musician's meticulousness but also Stéphane Grappelli's relish for flat-out swingers and Nigel Kennedy's rock and electronic music inflections. This set includes an original five-part suite, and adventurous treatments of the Gershwins' It Ain't Necessarily So and Tom Jobim's How Insensitive, performed by Garrick and a deft piano trio. The session hits the ground running with an uptempo account of the Gershwin, the leader playing a deep, zigzagging solo over light-stepping swing. How Insensitive is mostly sketches and impressions of the original theme, expressed in dark, slurred sounds. The Latin swinger June veers to the bland, but Garrick's diverse suit takes in a funky violin melody that shifts a gear into a dazzling fast solo, a hard-hit gospel clamour and a wah-wah sermon against soft organ sounds. However, it's the elegiac When We Wake Up We'll Be Somewhere Else, the quietest sustained passage on the disc, that's the real standout episode.