Male jazz singers seemed like a endangered species in the '80s and '90s; for every noteworthy male jazz singer who came along, there seemed to be 50 to 100 women who were taking up jazz singing. The very fact that
Giacomo Gates was a jazz-singing male in the '90s made you want to at least check him out and satisfy your curiosity, and thankfully, he had solid albums like
Fly Rite to back himself up. Joined by trumpeter/flügelhornist
Jim Rotondi, pianist
David Hazeltine, bassist Peter Washington, and drummer Ben Riley, the smoky-voiced, expressive
Gates brings a saxophone-like approach to bop classics like
Thelonious Monk's "Ask Me Now" (for which he embraces
Jon Hendricks' lyrics),
Horace Silver's "Señor Blues," and
Duke Pearson's "Jeannine." Quite adept at scat singing and vocalese,
Gates is well-served by such influences as
Mark Murphy,
King Pleasure, and
Eddie Jefferson but makes it clear that he's very much his own man. And
Gates' lyrics to
Monk's "Epistrophy" and
Lee Morgan's "Speedball" let us know that he isn't a bad lyricist either. The singer was in his late forties when this CD was recorded, but he was still quite obscure. One hoped that
Fly Rite would make him better known. ~ Alex Henderson