STANLEY TURRENTINE: More Than a Mood

More Than A Mood is more than just a mood. There is more here than the evocation of a reflective ambience. This is no one-way ticket to the jazz museum. This is Stanley Turrentine acknowledging and celebrating his influences, with a conviction born of experience. As he put it, "Man, guys like Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, and Jug (Gene Ammons), those are just some of the cats I listened to. My father, in fact, first played More Than A Mood by Don Byas for me many years ago so it's always been something I've wanted to do." He continued, "You see, I played some of my first gigs in saloons, places where you had to reach the people. You couldn't just play the songs, you had to get the sound, capture the feeling, and express the emotion." And so Turrentine pays his respects to these great jazz individuals by polishing up and showing off his own Jazz Medal of Honor: a distinctly individual sound. He's one of the select few with whom you hear a couple of notes and you KNOW who it is.