js For those who don’t already know, Gerry Beaudoin is an excellent bop oriented guitarist with an often relaxed and bluesy tone somewhat similar to Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery. On the softer numbers, Gerry’s feather light touch and finesse might recall George Benson as well. Gerry is blessed with chops a plenty, but fortunately he never gives into boring flashy technique. Although some music resources would possibly tag this album as neo-traditional, such a vague term doesn’t tell you much about the music. What we have on “The Return” is a nice mix of pre-fusion styles including bop, hard bop, blues and some samba influences, but all played with a very relaxed ‘cool’ approach. This isn’t the old west coast cool jazz of the 50s though, much of Beaudoin’s playing on here may be of a soft tone, but it is very much rooted in the bluesy language of the hard bop players.

I don’t know how long Gerry has been working with his rhythm section on here, but the way they come together sounds like they have known each other a long time. Guest Harry Allen is a great saxophonist who lends much to the soft blue atmosphere, but the best parts of this CD happen when Gerry effortlessly floats on top of his very subtle drum (Les Harris Jr) and bass (Jesse Williams) duo. The ambience that the three create together is on the sensitive side of things and is very nice. It also seems the sax might have a little extra reverb on it which may add to why it doesn’t quite blend the way the other three do.

For the serious jazz fan, Beaudoin is a guitar player you need to hear. For the casual jazz listener, put away that schmaltzy ‘contemporary’ album and put this on instead. “The Return” makes for great background music, but instead of ‘smooth’ sappiness, you get some real jazz with that late night club flavor most adults prefer.