For those unaware, Greg Chako is an internationally experienced jazz guitarist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and educator whose career spans five decades across the United States and Asia. Known for his warm tone, lyrical phrasing, and deeply swinging approach, Chako has built a wide-ranging body of work that reflects his grounding in mainstream jazz, hard bop, Latin jazz, and world-influenced modern jazz language.

A Cincinnati-born musician with years of professional activity in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Japan, Chako has recorded extensively as a leader and performed with musicians across several generations of the jazz tradition. His writing and playing are shaped by the melodic clarity of bebop, the blues-rooted drive of hard bop, and the rhythmic vocabulary of Latin and groove-based jazz.

After surviving a life-threatening battle with sepsis that threatened both his health and musical future, Chako returned to composition with a renewed sense of purpose. That experience led directly into Hard Bop: For The Record, a piano-less two-horn quintet recording that places his guitar at the harmonic center of the ensemble while reaffirming his commitment to original music, hard bop language, and personal expression within the jazz tradition.

On Hard Bop: For The Record, Chako turns renewed purpose into ten original compositions shaped by the soulful drive, memorable melodies, blues feeling, and swinging fire of the hard bop tradition. Inspired by the classic quintets of Horace Silver and Art Blakey, the album features saxophone, trombone, guitar, bass, and drums, with the intentional absence of piano allowing the guitar to serve as the harmonic core of the ensemble.

1. Mozambique [5:43]
2. Second Chance [4:21]
3. Ballad to the Bone [5:58]
4. Soar With the Wind [5:46]
5. Bop for Bud [7:10]
6. Mr. Higgins [5:43]
7. Time to Play [6:36]
8. Mellow-Dee [7:33]
9. April Wind [5:57]
10. For the Record [5:22]

Marking Chako’s return to the hard bop spirit that first inspired him as a young musician, he opens his new recording on the impassioned elegance of the sublime Mozambique and the free-flowing musical majesties of Second Chance before we are gifted the low slung, late night, back alley smokey blues of Ballad to the Bone, the upbeat and soulful Soar With the Wind and the melodiously jaunty Bop for Bud.

Then we are brought forth my own personal favorite cut the resplendently sculpted Mr. Higgins, which is in turn backed seamlessly by the engaging beauty of Time to Play, the veritably cinematic in its approach Mellow-Dee, the set rounding out on the frenetically charged April Wind, coming to a close on the fervently emotive title cut For the Record.

PLAYERS, INSTRUMENT:
Greg Chako — guitar
Brooks Giles — tenor & soprano saxophones
Spencer Merk — trombone
David Lloyd — bass
Alex Merk — drums

Official Purchase Link

www.CincyJazzman.com