Spring
Fever reminds us that there have always been jazz brothers,
jazz youth, and vital regional jazz centers. Chuck and Gap Mangione,
on trumpet and piano respectively, were promising siblings at
the time of this 1961 recording; and their Jazz Brothers quintet,
featuring Woody Herman star Sal Nistico on tenor, was a precocious
unit drawn primarily from the Upstate New York area. This band
was strong in all chairs [note, for instance, the musclar bass
lines and effective compositions of Frank Pullara], and represents
a vivid snapshot of where the hard-bop idiom was at in the early
Sixties.
