Rene Thomas - Remembering… Rare and Unreleased Performances by the Legendary Jazz Guitarist (2020)

Belgian by birth, but itinerant in spirit, guitarist Rene Thomas was uncommonly adept at adopting aggregate role models from a distance. The recordings of Django Reinhardt steered his earliest years as a student. Charlie Christian, Billy Bauer, and Jimmy Raney took over after exposure to the bebop and cool tributaries of jazz. Thomas assimilated aspects from each influence, devising an argot on his instrument that emphasized nimble single note structures and richly applied imagination to harmony. That winsome combination garnered immediate notice and led to a life traveling throughout Europe, stateside, and Canada, gigging with luminaries and journeymen alike in a myriad of jazz-oriented settings. Remembering… gathers nearly two-and-a-half hours of music of varying provenance recorded between 1955 and 1962.

Organized across two discs, the survey starts with five selections by the Jacques Pelzer Sextet featuring Thomas as a sideman. His strings are second only to the leader’s Konitz-inflected alto in solo order and the band runs through tunes by his hero Raney (“Motion”) and West Coast composer Lennie Niehaus alongside a clutch of standards. Two distinct Thomas fronted trios come next, the first captured at a Montreal club in early 1960 and the second in a single selection from a French festival the following year. With just bass and drums at his flanks, Thomas is free to improvise at length and turns in inventively loquacious interpretations of “Blue Train” and “Milestones” that playfully pull apart the tunes’ harmonic underpinnings.

The second disc centers on a succession of quartets and quintets, the first two co-led by Thomas’ old confrere Bobby Jasper on tenor and flute. The songbook across these initial sessions mines overlapping postbop territory with “Milestones” and “Oleo” among the covers serving as fertile material for both interplay and individual improvisation. Sandwiched between two more Thomas-helmed quartet dates is an intriguing anomaly, a performance culled from the 1962 Antibes Jazz Festival with Thomas taking the place of regular guitarist Quentin Warren in the Jimmy Smith Trio. The organist and his drummer Donald Bailey engage their guest in friendly fisticuffs on a basic blues and sparks are numerous enough to wish for a larger helping. Legendary is almost always a fraught honorific, but the strengths of this substantial collection suggest that Thomas’ prestige as plectrist was well earned.