With the release of his eleventh album, The Deconstructed Songbook, Daniel Bennett turns well-known material into something entirely his own. It draws from familiar composers and songwriters, including Joni Mitchell, Harold Arlen, Lennon and McCartney, Horace Silver, Wes Montgomery, Sam Rivers, and Bennett. Rather than treating these works as museum pieces, the Daniel Bennett Group reshapes them through inventive arrangements. The outcome is an album filled with warmth, imagination, and melodic clarity. Each track uncovers new dimensions within beloved compositions while maintaining an inviting accessibility. The whole album is much less of a collection of covers than a creative dialogue between musical eras and genres.
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“Road Song” by the legendary Wes Montgomery is the first gem on this incredible album which comes fully stocked with gems of the same quality order. This pays respect to the guitarist between Bennett himself and Nat Janoff, an equally artistic player in his own right, up for the test any day. This is not only a standard cover effort, it’s musically contemporary and updates the song in the process of paying tribute.
The album keeps going by injecting some of Bennett’s own original work on “The Town Supervisor,” with its hypnotic tones that draw you in and keep you anticipating every wavering note of the saxophone. This is the type of jazz some would just as soon consider jazzy, pop-jazz, or smooth jazz; but it contains all of the above without disgracing the actual form. Jazz lovers reading this can understand the difference.
“Nica’s Dream” is the selected Horace Silver tune brought back to life by Bennett and company, with a flair from Nat Janoff and the piano of Jason Yeager heated to its highest temperature. This magnificent playing is heard throughout The Deconstructed Songbook.
One of the album’s obvious highlights comes in the form of Joni Mithcell’s “Both Sides Now” and it stands out as the most familiar sounding track on the album, whether or not this was intended, it brings a chill to the spine if you remember the classic folk song.
“My Shining Hour” by Harold Arlen leaves Bennett and Yeager all the room in the world to feed off one another for another musically interesting take, with Janoff adding the essential jazz guitar section of butterfly notes.
Nearing the end of The Reconstructed Songbook, Bennett injects a rendition of “Beatrice” by Sam Rivers into the picture, with one of the softest and most delicate pieces on the album. This features the Daniel Bennett Group at its finest playing, but it’s a hard call between the seven songs.
“Here, There And Everywhere” takes things out on an ultra-familiar note, with a respectable version of what is more than likely the most popularly known song among the track list, and it tops the entire disc off with a version that stands up to the original, on a musically adventurous album of covers full of the same ilk. This results in the unusual instrumental cover of a Beatles song, which is always an interesting and welcomed idea.
Chadwick Easton