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The impressive duo, individually and collectively, has played with some of the giants of jazz including Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, and Paul Desmond. Guitar veteran Eddie Duran, first met multi-reed player Mad (short for Madaline) in the early '80s at the Cotati Jazz Festival, just north of San Francisco. Eddie was raised in the '30s and '40s, Mad in the '60s and '70s -- just north of the Peninsula. It wasn't quite love at first listen, but almost.
Mad had picked up on Eddie's reputation for swinging his musical ax with the likes of Vince Guaraldi, George Shearing, and Benny Goodman. Eddie invited the attractive young woman to bring her sax to his place to blow some bop. "I have a thing where, if I'm going to get close to someone romantically, they have to be a musician, they have to have a love of music," Eddie explains.
Since then, they've married, grown even closer personally and musically, and have finally come together as a new act with a new CD that allows a listener to get close to both of them and their love of jazz. Dig the spirited intro to the album opener, Clifford Brown's Daahoud, and you'll witness already that marvelous merging of married instruments.
Eddie had family backing, literally and figuratively. He began borrowing his brother Carlos's guitar when he was six. Before and after his military service, Eddie teamed with his brothers Carlos (who'd switched to bass) and Manny (piano) in a trio modeled on Nat King Cole's.
Eddie became a staple in the fertile San Francisco club scene of the '50s, performing with illustrious locals Guaraldi and Cal Tjader (with both of whom he also recorded) and sitting in with distinguished visitors like Shearing, who was able to coax the Bay-bound Eddie to tour with him for a year. "Word of mouth got around from people who came into town," says Eddie. "They liked my sound, my phrasing, and my good knowledge of tunes."
These qualities also appealed to those who heard him in the early '60s, performing on stage between the comedy acts at the legendary Hungry i in San Francisco's North Beach, and on a radio variety show over KCBS. Stan Getz tapped Eddie to perform with him in Vancouver. However, Eddie was also a devoted householder raising a family with his first wife, and not inclined to travel. It wasn't until his wife had died and the kids had grown that he accepted Benny Goodman's invitation to play New York and tour the globe, starting in 1976.
At that point, Mad was cooking in kitchens around San Francisco, not on-stage, though she'd studied classical clarinet and had moved on easily to the sax family and jazz. "The teacher would give me an instrument, and within three weeks I'd taught myself all the fingerings," she says. While in school, she had the opportunity to study and perform with Clark Terry, Oliver Nelson, and John Lewis at the Monterey Jazz Festival. After graduating with a music degree from the University of Miami, she found surer money working in restaurants near her Peninsula hometown, and she then relocated north to the active Napa County culinary scene. That's when she met Eddie.
Eddie turned Mad on to the tasty Bay Area jazz scene, urging her to apply her fast learning skills to a variety of reed instruments in all twelve keys and to sit in with the likes of Al Plank and Vince Lateano at local clubs. She also attended the Stanford Jazz Workshop to study with Stan Getz and pianist/teacher Mark Levine, who "consolidated everything for me and gave me the tools I needed to plug in information about improvisation." Mad became known in jazz circles for her hip, happy sound.
As club gigs began to dry up in the '80s, Mad convinced Eddie to seek out some energy with the jazz nucleus in New York City. Mad managed to sharpen her Latin chops with Las Ninas de Nueva York and to play in the all-female big band of Kit McClure, but Eddie found that the Big Apple was somewhat sour on outsiders, no matter how venerable their credentials. "That was disappointing to me," he says, "because music is something you share, it's not a competition."
Eddie and Mad, ultimately decided to get back to San Francisco and in gear with each other. The return to home base resulted in a further evolution of both instrumentalists. "I like playing as a duo with Eddie almost better than anything else. We are so in tune with each other," testifies Mad, who's gigged with George Cables, Tootie Heath, James Moody, and Jessica Williams. "The earlier Eddie was more focused on linear lines and comping," she says of her husband. "Now the new Eddie has become more of an orchestral sound, not just playing single lines or chords but harmonies that work with the arrangement." The mellifluous bop of their recorded take on Bud Powell and Miles Davis's Budo and their lilting sway of Bill Evans's Very Early support the players' claims.
"And also rhythmically," Eddie continues, "we can do Latin, Brazilian and bossa nova, and straight-ahead jazz and it all works." Cases in point: the mesmerizing rendition of the medley, My Favorite Things and Take Five, could prove to be the most ear catching piece on the album; the ticklish Latinization of Benny Goodman's theme song, Don't Be That Way; the Brazilian twist on Duran's original, Symphony Sid Samba, has four bars reminiscent of the familiar blues theme; the suave bossa in the title tune; and the crackling CTA (featuring old pals Al Plank and Vince Lateano, as well as bassist Scott Steed).
Working in the comfort of the Bay Area with the best of that region's musicians, Mad & Eddie are now ready for the world. "This album is a documentation of our work, of our soul," says Mad. "And it's also a standard of measure for the next one." With this album as a precedent, what follows will be much anticipated.
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