Blue Note Records
2004
Public (Live)
About This Album
Greg Osby has certainly been prolific over the course of the last decade. His outings for Blue Note are always challenging, always extending one boundary or another in his own idiosyncratic jazz iconography that uses elements of the historical tradition, the mainstream, and the avant-garde> in forging that signature. Public was recorded in January, 2004 at New York's Jazz Standard. Osby was playing in support of 2003's excellent St. Louis Shoes album. That band -- trumpeter Osby on alto, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Rodney Green -- all make this gig. The only change is the replacement of pianist Harold O'Neil with Japanese prodigy Megumi Yonezawa. The material features live renditions of three tunes from St. Louis Shoes; there are the reinventions of the two bebop classics, "Bernie's Tune" and "Shaw Nuff," each with staggered, jagged harmonic frameworks that are alternately jaggedly and pristinely wrought. Osby recontextualizes the original melodies in his own fragmented lyric image with phrasing that skips off the one beats and into the shadowy rhythmic corners painted by Yonezawa. Osby's interaction with the pianist is near symbiotic, but it is the fireworks he and Payton engage in that take the tunes over the top.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 5)

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