OLIVER JONES AND SKIP BEY
Then and Now
Justin Time
· Oliver Jones comes out of a two-year retirement to finish a project he started 15 years earlier with Montreal bassist Skip Bey.
· Tracks featured are a combination of two sessions in 1986 and 2001.
Leaving shoes the size of which only he could fill, Oliver Jones left the Canadian jazz scene in 2000 after decades of artful, if not meaningful, contributions to the jazz piano idiom. Although he garnered several Juno awards and the Order of Canada, Jones felt that his creative statements had become irrelevant, and decided to leave the jazz scene that he had helped nurture over the latter part of the 20th century.
Yet, early 2001 saw Jones counter obscurity and return to his past, finishing a musical thought he had started 15 years prior. Begun in 1986, the latest session completes a collaboration with Montreal bassist Skip Bey. Returning to the studio with the same producer Jones worked with in ’86, the idea was to record enough tracks to fill an album. The finished project, Then and Now, is less a duo album and more the usual solo acrobatic demonstration of Jones’s hard-swinging blues-style playing. Skip Bey is a competent sideman who regrettably isn’t given enough opportunity to show why he’s still one of the most sought-after bassists in the Montreal scene.
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