Songs from the past, bittersweet

Teddy Wilson Trio: Revisits the Goodman Years

This concert, recorded in Copenhagen on June 15, 1980, is an exercise in nostalgia, as Teddy Wilson plays tunes from his time with Benny Goodman in the mid-1930s. What's amazing is how fresh this music sounds. That speaks volumes about Wilson's professionalism and his amazing technical skills, but it's a tribute as well to his very fine sidemen: bassist Jesper Lundgaard and the amazing Ed Thigpen on drums. The Copenhagen concert is coming up to forty years in the past, while the original Goodman sessions they refer to were just over forty years old at that time. We're looking into a mirror that shows us something even farther away, and each nostalgic bounce provides its own pleasures, no matter how bittersweet. "To memory", Jacques Roubaud says in The Great Fire of London, "everything is present, everything distant; this is the axiom of intertwining."