A club tape can sit in a vault for a long time before it becomes a record. This one waited thirty-four years.
Sweet Basil opened at 88 Seventh Avenue South in 1974 and quickly became one of the rooms where New York's live jazz got documented rather than just played: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers cut sessions there, as did Gil Evans's Monday Night Orchestra. Ron Carter has history with the room specifically. His 1977 album Piccolo, recorded early in his years on the Milestone label, was among the first live dates to come out of Sweet Basil at all.
This one dates from 1990, a quartet co-billed with trumpeter and flugelhorn player Art Farmer, alongside pianist Cedar Walton and drummer Billy Higgins. Walton and Higgins arrived already fluent in each other's playing, having anchored the group Eastern Rebellion together since the mid-1970s, and that familiarity sets the tempo for the whole set: nothing here is rushed to prove a point.
The material splits between the band's own writing and one enormous standard. Carter contributes 'It's About Time (Reprise)' and a nine-minute closer called 'A Theme in 3/4'; Farmer brings 'Art's Song', a feature built for his flugelhorn's softer register; Walton offers 'When Love Is New' and Higgins 'Shortcomings', on which his solo stays economical rather than showy. In between sits 'My Funny Valentine', stretched past eight minutes, the quartet in no apparent hurry to resolve it.
Farmer glides rather than announces himself.
That's the character of the whole record: a working unit playing at conversational volume, Carter's bass doing what it always does, holding time without drawing attention to the holding. It's a register Carter has returned to across a long career of session and leader dates alike, valuing pulse over flash, and it suits a quartet where every other member had spent decades doing the same.
Arkadia Jazz put the recording out in 2024, on 180-gram vinyl, closing a loop that started with Carter himself opening Sweet Basil's recorded history nearly half a century earlier.
