Soul Meeting: Home Cookin’

Basel drummer and bandleader Lucio Marelli has spent the past few years building Soul Meeting into one of the more interesting soul-jazz projects working out of Switzerland, and on 21 August the group finally put a record behind it: Home Cookin’, released on Mons Records in collaboration with Radio SRF 2 Kultur.

The quartet is Marelli on drums, saxophonist Alex Hendriksen, guitarist Oliver Pellet and bassist Benedikt Vonder Mühll — a lineup built around the guitar-and-sax strain of soul-jazz that Lou Donaldson, King Curtis, Horace Silver, Grant Green and Hank Mobley defined as hard bop pushed toward groove and blues feeling in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The band’s name and the album title both point straight at that lineage: King Curtis released his own Soul Meeting in 1960, and Jimmy Smith’s Home Cookin’ is one of the defining records of the style. It isn’t a subtle reference, and it doesn’t need to be — the group wears its sources openly rather than dressing them up.

Marelli’s range is what makes this work. He trained at the Hochschule für Musik Basel FHNW under Julio Barreto, Jorge Rossy and Vic Hart, and has since studied tabla and North Indian classical rhythm with Sankar Prosad Chowdhoury while leading groups as different from each other as Sere Serpe, switalo jazz and Skins, Strings & Winds — work that’s taken him from Montreux to Locarno to stages in Morocco and Kosovo. Soul-jazz drumming barely touches most of that vocabulary; it stays close to the pocket, with little room for ornament. But a player who has worked through several rhythmic systems develops a sharp instinct for what a groove needs and what it doesn’t, and that instinct is all over Home Cookin’. Marelli never reaches for more than a tune requires, and the record’s groove holds together because of it.

That’s really the story of the record. I’ve had Home Cookin’ on repeat since it landed, and it captures that late-’50s soul-jazz feel about as well as anything I’ve heard from a European band this year. Groove is the whole point of this style, and Marelli’s quartet has it in spades. What’s more impressive is that the seven original compositions, split between Marelli, Pellet and Vonder Mühll, sit comfortably alongside the soul-jazz repertoire without feeling like museum pieces — Mons’s own label copy calls it the band “cooking up their own special blend,” and that’s about right. There’s a modern edge running through the writing even while the band stays firmly inside the tradition it’s paying tribute to.

Hendriksen’s presence is a good match for that balance. Berklee-trained and a fixture of the Basel scene since the late ’90s, he’s better known for harmonically dense, changes-based playing than for the blues-drenched honking of the soul-jazz saxophonists this record draws on — and that tension is part of what makes his contribution here worth hearing.

The track we’ve added to this month’s New Jazz & More playlist is “Dizzy’s Blues,” the album opener. It’s as good an introduction to the record as any — recognisably soul-jazz, played by musicians who know the tradition well enough to make it their own rather than simply re-enact it.

Marelli, beyond Soul Meeting, is a fixture of the Basel scene in more ways than one — he also runs the Jazz im Kloster and Barakuba Jazznights concert series and teaches drums in Riehen and Dornach. The band marked the release with a launch show at MUKS in Riehen on 23 August. Home Cookin’ is out now on Mons Records — find it on streaming or at luciomarelli.ch.

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