Picture this: A tanned, charismatic bandleader. He is tall and self-assured, clean-shaven, with a collection of combs in his dresser drawer at home. He plays drums. He has great taste. The best cats in town always join his band. The man turns heads. He gets a haircut every week. He has a business card that reads Dance Music For All Occasions. Did we mention he looks a bit like Chevy Chase? He looks a bit like Chevy Chase. And his band sounds amazing: It’s hot and thrilling and alive, the best hotel jazz combo in St. Louis.
The bandleader’s name is Nolan Earl Crane. He is not the creator of this record, a record that’s also called Dance Music For All Occasions, and which arrives June 28 on Elastic Recordings. This LP — a collection of dazzling, beat-driven instrumentals — was made by Nolan’s son, a drummer named Tommy Crane, who inherited his dad’s ear but maybe not his physique. Tommy has toured the world playing jazz with Melissa Aldana, Mingus Big Band and Aaron Parks’ Little Big Quartet, or backing up artists including Martha Wainwright, La Force and Unessential Oils. He’s released progressive jazz with Binney & Crane and experimental rock-jazz with Angell & Crane; his most recent solo LP, 2022’s We’re All Improvisers Now, was a pandemic pièce de resistance, turning solitary music-making into an explosion of rhythm, synth and vision.
But in 2022, with his father as his muse, Tommy became a bandleader. The Montreal-based musician had spent months laying the groundwork: Recording his own demos, writing out the songs, creating charts and lead-sheets, then working with co-producer Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals, Unessential Oils) to figure out how the stuff should sound and how it should be recorded. Only when that was ready did Tommy assemble his principal quartet, bringing together his scenes in New York and Montreal: Alto saxophonist Charlotte Greve (Wood River, Arooj Aftab) flew up on points; bassist Simon Jermyn (Wood River, Jim Black Trio) caught the Port Authority bus; pianist Edwin De Goej (U.S. Girls, Martha Wainwright) might have hopped his bike cross-town. The work was professional, efficient; pros all together in a room. One and a half ecstatic days, all of it live to tape.
The sound that resulted is sensuous and lush, a jazz that’s informed by Grover Washington, Boards of Canada, Keith Jarrett’s European quartet, and George Benson’s Breezin’. “My father was obsessed with smooth jazz from the ’70s and ’80s,” Tommy remembers, “stuff by session guys from bands like Toto and Steely Dan.” He and Warren were determined to pay tribute to that sound, harnessing the players’ contemporary talents to a music that feels like cruising down a highway under dappled sunset skies. Everything started with rhythm (Tommy’s a drummer, after all), ensuring a complexity and purpose to what might otherwise seem too sweet. A track like Italian Weekend began with a skeletal drumbeat like early Aphex Twin; Let’s Try This Again, the album’s euphoric centrepiece, started as an endlessly looping jam.
Tommy also took inspiration from Talk Talk’s groundbreaking album The Colour of Spring. During lockdown, he had somehow found the audacity to contact Martin Ditcham, the English percussionist who plays on that record (Ditcham also tours with Sade, and co-wrote The Sweetest Taboo). The two became unexpected friends, and Ditcham’s chimes, shakers and cabasa appear throughout Dance Music For All Occasions. Other guests include Sarah Pagé (Barr Brothers, Esmerine), Eli Miller Maboungou (Joe Chambers, Jazz Amboka), Mishka Stein (Patrick Watson, Teke Teke) and Claire Devlin (Bellbird).
This is a maximal record: An album that unfurls and unfurls and unfurls again in technicolour layers. Even after the main recording was complete, it took Tommy another 16 months to hone the compositions. “There’s so much happening under the hood,” he explains — from surprising codas to a custom saxophone-synth. He wanted, above all, to capture a particular vibe: The juxtaposition of warm, comfortable harmonies and a kinetic, earthbound rhythm.
The kind of record, in other words, that a man who looks like Chevy Chase might have enjoyed. Nolan Earl Crane died in 2011, but “he would have loved it, I think,” Tommy says. “I’d have burnt it onto a CD for him to listen to in his car.”
You’ll enjoy it too, even if you don’t have a car. Dance Music For All Occasions represents a kind of music it’s almost impossible not to enjoy, complex and generous. Tommy Crane plays drums, he has great taste — and his band sounds amazing, hot and thrilling and alive.
Check out the first single Italian Weekend above, pre-save the second single Life Is So Much Better In The Lounge HERE, pre-order the album on Bandcamp HERE, sample more music from Tommy Crane below, and find him on his website and Instagram.
