(Jazz) Monty Alexander - The Good Life: Monty Alexander Plays the Songs of Tony Bennett - 2008, APE (image+.cue), lossless

Jamaica-born Monty Alexander has turned out some fine disc on the Telarc label, and this one with Chesky retains his reputation for an infectious, bouncy, very rhythmic style of improvisation with his trio. He brings in more different influences in this music than heard with many other jazz pianists - gospel, blues, music of the Caribbean (including reggae), boogie-woogie, and the focus of this album - songs popularized by the great Tony Bennett. Monty loves singers, and one of his mother’s favorite songs was Bennett’s Because of You, which closes out the dozen tracks. So he decided to slant this first of his two new Chesky dates to his own versions of some of the tunes of this powerful and passionate singer.
Several of the tunes come from musicals. I always have thought Just in Time - from the collaboration of Jule Styne with Comden & Green, was a gem and evidently so does Monty. His treatment had me hearing Judy Holiday delivering it in one of my fav musicals, Bells Are Ringing. There is also the movie tie-in; Maybe September comes from the Tony Bennett film The Oscar, and everybody and his brother in jazz seems to be doing Charlie Chaplin’s Smile lately - what a gorgeous tune! Monty makes a seven-minute mini-rhapsody of it.
The surround sonics are tops, as always with Chesky. The venue was St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in NYC, not a dead-sounding studio. Nearly all their sessions now employ a specially-modified version of the Ambisonic Soundfield Mark 5 single-point mike system which is converted to 5.0 DSD for mastering to SACD. Both the drums and piano sound natural-sized and with natural timbres - not exaggerated as heard on so many recordings with too many multiple mikes. That’s one of the major attributes of Chesky’s approach, to my ears.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 6. September 2008, 18:46
Monty Alexander / The Music of Tony Bennett
Used drive : PLEXTOR DVDR PX-750A Adapter: 2 ID: 1
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 102
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Used output format : Monkey's Audio Lossless Encoder v3.99 DLL
Sample format : Normal Lossless Compression
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
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1 | 0:00.00 | 5:32.10 | 0 | 24909
2 | 5:32.10 | 5:07.00 | 24910 | 47934
3 | 10:39.10 | 7:09.00 | 47935 | 80109
4 | 17:48.10 | 6:10.00 | 80110 | 107859
5 | 23:58.10 | 6:40.00 | 107860 | 137859
6 | 30:38.10 | 3:38.00 | 137860 | 154209
7 | 34:16.10 | 4:19.00 | 154210 | 173634
8 | 38:35.10 | 3:06.00 | 173635 | 187584
9 | 41:41.10 | 6:05.00 | 187585 | 214959
10 | 47:46.10 | 4:39.00 | 214960 | 235884
11 | 52:25.10 | 3:17.00 | 235885 | 250659
12 | 55:42.10 | 2:27.20 | 250660 | 261704
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Filename C:Monty Alexander - The Music of Tony Bennett.ape
Peak level 100.0 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC 1F90DC52
Copy OK
No errors occurred
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