For The First Time

Over the last decade, Hugh O'Connor has been playing a lot of great jazz saxophone for people who aren't particularly listening to him. This CD should remedy that. For the past four years O'Connor has played every Sunday at a nice restaurant-bar in Ottawa's Byward Market called Chez Lucien. The drinkers and diners applaud respectfully and some of them listen intently, but mostly it's a drinking-dining place and the music is background to the chatter. Before this, O'Connor worked for five years at another Ottawa restaurant in the same kind of environment. There were others before that. And yet, when you walk into the restaurant and hear Hugh singing his way through a standard or a jazz classic with an old friend on piano like Mark Ferguson or J.P. Allain, you know that this music needs undivided attention. Given the quality of music on display whenever O'Connor performs, it is astonishing that this is his first recording as leader in a 60-year career. In a way, it recreates, without the tinkling of glasses, the atmosphere at Chez Lucien. For this CD, O'Connor chose his sidemen from among Ottawa's A-list. The fact that they were also old friends didn't hurt. 'It helps to make better music together when you're friends,' he says. Pianist Mark Ferguson, bassist John Geggie and Drummer Don Johnston round out the line up. True North Records. 2010.