It’s rare indeed that a contemporary jazz album arrives with little precedent, but Catherine Russell’s and Sean Mason’s My Ideal immediately set a nonpareil standard for a rarified format. The jazz canon includes at least half-a-dozen classic duo albums pairing vocalists and pianists, a short list that starts with ballad-centric sessions featuring Ellis Larkins and Ella Fitzgerald, Alan Broadbent and Irene Kral, and Fred Hersch with, well, Esperanza Spalding, Norma Winstone or Jay Clayton, take your pick. The 2024 release of My Ideal added another entry to this exclusive club, yet in theory and practice it captures a far more expansive, blues-steeped aesthetic than its superlative, stripped-down peers.
Rather than cultivating an atmosphere of late-night nostalgia and heartache, Mason and Russell explore a panoply of moods and grooves informed by a broad spectrum of pre-bop approaches tied to jazz’s essential roots as social music. Russell is the world’s preeminent exponent of the jazz-blues-R&B continuum that flowered so spectacularly between 1925-1955. With Mason as interpreter and pianist she’s joined by an ideal collaborator deeply versed in the era’s manifold styles, idioms, and emotional contours.
“We trust each other, which allows us to be fully ourselves,” Mason says. “It’s a true partnership, a rare dynamic between a pianist and a vocalist. I did a lot of studying to prepare for this record, looking at pre-1940s situations and the piano duo format with classic blues singers, or how Earl Hines approached the duo role in ‘Weather Bird.’ We’re drawing from a pre-War sound, taking it back to when it was dance music. Even the ballads are dancing.”
While hardly the focus of My Ideal, the balladry is sublime, like the honey-drip paced title track, where Mason’s luscious, theatrical voicings accentuate Russell’s imploring tone (while his solo’s thematic development comments wryly on the lyric). The rarely covered “On the Sentimental Side” represents a ballroom ballad approach, swinging tenderly but persuasively as if Russell was Tommy Dorsey and Mason was the orchestra. Their supple motivic call and response is alert and assertive, as Mason’s solo caresses the melody like a couple swaying on the dance floor.
In many ways My Ideal is a portrait of two extraordinary artists at play, an effervescent mood exemplified by the opening track, “A Porter's Love Song (To a Chambermaid).” Indelibly linked to Fats Waller, the song comes from James P. Johnson’s and Andy Razaf’s forgotten 1930 musical celebrating Harlem laborers, The Kitchen Mechanics Revue, and the duo fully embraces Waller’s nimble deployment of irony, wit and charm, starting with the beautiful verse. Mason leans into the dandified nature of Waller’s side-of-the-mouth pianism, tickling the upper register of the keyboard until he delivers a hint of off-kilter Monkian stride. Waller is also the point of departure for the obscure “You Stayed Away Too Long,” though Russell and Mason take it at a slightly more deliberate tempo than the irrepressible Fats. Concise and cogent, Mason’s elegantly swinging solo, which is neither a two-step nor really a shuffle, evokes the protean state of the groove as R&B emerged from jazz in the 1940s.
The imposing aura of Ray Charles infuses “I Don't Need No Doctor,” an arrangement that exemplifies Mason’s orchestrational prowess as he handles rhythm section responsibilities with his left hand and horn section riffs with his right (at times even adding background “vocals” for Russell). “Ain’t That Love” is a blast of soul straight outta the Black church, a hand-clapping, pew-rocking blues that Mason builds with a sleek approach to stride. Dipping into an earlier blues lexicon, Mason infuses the bawdy “Ain't Got Nobody to Grind My Coffee” with early New Orleans relish as Russell inhabits the role of uninhibited blueswoman.
From the insistently earthy to the ineffably elegant, the duo glides through the neglected Irving Berlin gem “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing,” which Mason introduces with a big band vamp, circa 1964. Moving from a ravishing, lyrical solo to musical theater homage, Mason offers flashes of harmonic density before taking a playful bow.
They highlight another neglected gem with Loonis McGlohon’s and Alec Wilder’s “South to a Warmer Place,” a song introduced by Frank Sinatra in 1981. Interpreted by Mason with sumptuous, haunting chords, the song is more intensely introspective in Russell’s hands. The album closes with “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In,” a Peggy Lee vehicle that charges forward with chugging momentum that Mason describes as “a freight-train groove,” with his left hand providing the four-beat banjo pulse.
Whatever a tune’s vintage or provenance, Mason is dialed into the story each song tells. “I wrote out the lyrics to each song by hand, transcribing the words by ear from the recordings,” he says. “If I don’t get the lyrical intention from the beginning I’m not serving the interpretation. I take the art of interpretation as seriously as the art of composition, and only after I internalize the lyrics do I begin to learn the melody.”
Mason’s command of the jazz styles and musical personalities that flowered during the first half of the 20th century lights up every track. Most pianists of his generation, to say nothing of the two or three cohorts that preceded him, were cut off from those idioms, a generational transmission disrupted by the bebop revolution. But the music, with all its glorious multiplicity, retains its power and brilliance, at least in the hands of Mason, an artist who knows that the past has much to tell us about ourselves.
