Almost a decade has passed and this record remains lost on the racks. It's a true gem. Stellar performances by Hurst's contemporaries in the original Tonight Show Band (Branford Marsalis, Jeff Watts, Kenny Kirkland) glimmer and shine. Hurst's bass playing is like a caress. It envelopes you in its warmth and comfort. Bass fans tend to fall into one of two categories: advocates of tastefulness who've cannonized Oscar Pettiford and Ray Brown, and acolytes of rage whose patron saints are Charles Mingus and Reggie Workman. Bob Hurst's embrace pleases the former without rejecting the latter. But if you fall into that camp, click off now. You've got little to please you here.
Followers of dearly departed Kenny Kirkland cherish every recording he made. And his performance here is among his most best; it's nuanced, tasteful (some would say uncharacteristically so) and delicately heartfelt. Hurst's solo take on Evidence may sound academic to some ears, but opens new universes of exploration to mine. And what better way to interpret Monk? The rest of the album's compositions are Hursts, whose writing offers the post-post-modernist tendencies of the neo-classicist generation without the at-times soporific densities of its leading proponents.
