Review by J Hunter
Photographs by Rudy Lu

All the music on Keith Pray’s new disc “Confluence” was played by a “quartet plus one,” a concept Pray got from the jazz icon Joe Henderson. At the Van Dyck, though, it was just a quartet that took the stage in front of a literally packed house; it seems the “plus one” – guitarist Chuck D’Aloia – moved to Los Angeles in December. Mind you, nature abhors a vacuum, so between the four excellent musicians (plus one surprise guest star), the gap left by D’Aloia’s absence was filled in less-than-nothing flat.

As Pray kicked off the first set with the title track from the disc, it struck me that this swinging thing warming the stage so nicely was actually created as an afterthought: Late in the creation of the disc, Pray realized he didn’t have “a high energy and up-tempo swinging tune” in his arsenal, so he wrote this piece. Never mind that there are other places on “Confluence” that swing like Spiderman on a bender, but that’s an argument for another day. All that mattered here was that Pray was already blowing his head off while pianist Peter Tomlinson, bassist Lou Pappas and drummer Jeff “Siege” Siegel bubbled and sparked underneath him… and this was only the first tune!

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