David Friesen - Star Dance (1976 US Inner City Vinyl LP)

David Friesen - Star Dance | Vinyl LP - 1976 US Inner City (IC 1019, purple labels)

Star Dance is a bass player's record that never once feels like a bass showcase. David Friesen wrote all ten pieces and holds the centre of every one, but the album belongs just as much to the sound of Paul McCandless's oboe and English horn, instruments you almost never hear carrying a jazz lead, drifting over John Stowell's guitar and Friesen's enormous acoustic tone. The whole thing was cut in one day, 8 November 1976 at Downtown Sound in New York. Steve Gadd is the surprise. A year on from the session work that made him the most in-demand drummer in the city, he plays here with real restraint, colouring "Winter's Fall" and "Duet And Dialogue" rather than driving them, and sitting out entirely where the music wants only bass and reeds. Titles like "Dolphin In The Sky", "Fields Of Joy" and "Children Of The Kingdom" point at the openly spiritual streak that runs through Friesen's writing, closer in spirit to the pastoral end of ECM than to anything hard-bop. It is quiet, unhurried music.

Friesen came to it late and from the margins. He was a Pacific Northwest player with one solo-bass album behind him, Color Pool on Muse in 1975, and Star Dance was the record that got him noticed, warmly reviewed and enough of a success to set the shape of what followed. The partnership with John Stowell was the real find. The two had met by chance in a Village piano bar the winter before the session, and they went on to tour Europe and Australia together and record as a duo across the next eight years. McCandless and Stowell both came back for the follow-up, Waterfall Rainbow, in 1977, this time with Ralph Towner in the guitar chair alongside Stowell, which makes the two Inner City albums a natural pair. Gadd, characteristically, moved on.

This is the original 1976 US pressing on Inner City with the purple labels, catalogue number IC 1019.