Bobby Jaspar - Bobby Jaspar Early Years: From Be-Bop to Cool - 1947-1951 (2019)

This CD includes the early steps of Bobby Jaspar as a jazz musician, when he started on clarinet and then tenor saxophone, as he formed the young award-winning Belgian band they called “Bob Shots” —the first in Europe to play “be-bop” back in 1947 under the guidance of Jaspar's influence, Don Byas. One year later he met Lucky Thompson onstage in an enriching experience, and he became his new inspiration. These two encounters helped Bobby grow musically in a way that would make him a success everywhere, a blend of styles that was a compromise between the turbulence of Thompson, Lester Young, Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, etc., and the rhapsodic style of Byas and Hawkins.

Already as a professional in Paris in 1950, he adopted the new “cool” sound, influenced at the beginning by Warne Marsh and then later by his new aesthetic referent Stan Getz. “A pure sonority, like that of Getz, is preferable to an abortive imitation of the black sound,” Jaspar said. Jazz-Hot’s Lucien Malson said of Jaspar that he was “one of the few tenors in Europe who could compare to any of the white American tenor saxophonists and come out on top.”

Although the sound quality of these recordings is generally acceptable, it has issues at times and we haven’t been able to clean the original source as well as we would have liked. That said, they are still an exceptional document that not only puts in value the unforgettable Bobby Jaspar, but also reminds us of the origins of the best jazz generation to emerge from Belgium.