At the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village, NYC: Tuck & Patti

Going back to the Blue Note twice in the same week felt almost like a job, especially since I expected another performance of the Kenny Barron and Stefon Harris kind, the one I didn't particularly enjoy. I was pleasantly surprised, however, with what I heard from Tuck & Patti.

Tuck & Patti is a husband-and-wife duo. What is unusual about them, in terms of a traditional jazz band, is that there is only one instrument involved in their performance, which is a guitar. Tuck Andress plays it, while Patti Cathcart sings. I don't know for how long they have been playing together, but the point remains that they are in absolute harmony.

Cathcart has a very strong, melodic voice that is fairly deep for a woman. I don't think she would have had a problem singing with an accompaniment of an entire jazz band, or even a bigger concert band. Which makes it even more remarkable that Andress' guitar is easily heard underneath Cathcart's singing. And their repertoire is a much more familiar to me personally soul and R&B, rather than improvisational jazz that is often disjointed in terms of rhythm and melody and is difficult to listen to. Perhaps this is why some of their songs, such as "Castles Made Of Sand" and "Little Wing" sounded vaguely familiar, although they did mention Jimi Hendrix as the original performer. One song, called "Time After Time," performed at the insistence of the audience closer to the end of the show, has the rhythm and beat of rock-n-roll more than that of jazz, at least in my opinion.

I like guitar as an instrument for the way it sounds, and for the charisma of many guitar players, and Andress did not disappoint me with his solos and improvisations. Many of them sounded almost like different songs from the ones where they accompanied the voice of Cathcart, but at the same time they masterfully held and developed the rhythm of the entire song in them. Another thing that I noticed relevant to this was that he played with his fingers rather than using a pick. I guess that is the only way to produce such flowing rhythms and melodies out of a guitar, instead of march-like or simple dance-beat style of music. On the other end of the improvisation, Cathcart would enter back into the song with vocals, like she never left. This smooth transition from duo to solo performance impressed me to no end.

Another aspect of performance that I noticed only after I left the club was how well every song kept its rhythm speed despite the vocalist being accompanied by nothing but an acoustic guitar. Running through the performance in my head, I realized that Andress concentrated heavily on bass lines, thus keeping the flow of the song intact and moving, and only then added chords to it, while still making it sound very natural.

Another thing worth mentioning is that some of the people sitting nearby noted that some of the songs did not sound the same way they heard them before, either recorded or live. My guess would be that the duo actually experiments with their songs, improvising on a fly, adding new chords or new bass lines, speeding it up or slowing it down - I am sure the possibilities are endless. Since I only heard each song once, I have no way to draw definite conclusions.