Dave Stryker, Blue Fire – The Van Gelder Session Review

Deep in the Pocket: Dave Stryker’s Blue Fire – The Van Gelder Session

By Nolan DeBuke

 From the first downbeat of “Van Gelder’s Place,” Blue Fire – The Van Gelder Session by Dave Stryker announces itself with one word: swing! Not polite swing. Not studied swing. This is big, greasy, dance-floor swing, the kind of feel that comes from a trio built to play all night, lock into a pocket, and let the room move with them. Guitar, organ, and drums fall immediately into a wide, buoyant groove that feels natural and rooted in a lineage where feel was the first requirement and musicianship followed close behind.

Stryker sounds completely at home in this environment. His jazz box guitar tone is full and confident, and his phrasing favors rhythmic clarity. His tasty single-note lines, buoyant octaves, and chordal punctuations ride the groove instead of crowding it. There’s a calm authority to his playing, a sense that every phrase knows where it’s going and exactly how much space it needs. Jared Gold’s organ lines are melodic and deeply supportive, shaping harmony and motion while keeping the music grounded in warmth. McClenty Hunter’s drumming is the engine: wide-pocket swing, strong backbeat awareness, and a dance-first sensibility that never lets the groove thin out.

Throughout the set of nine tracks, the trio moves fluidly through different expressions of the organ-guitar-drums tradition without losing its center. Bluesy, riff-based swing gives way to sharper post-bop contours, straight eight feels, waltzes, then relaxes into ballad territory with an ease that speaks to long-term musical trust. The language evolves, but the feel remains constant. Though modern jazz vocabulary is always present, it is tempered by an accessible, blues-rooted sense of motion. Even as harmonic and rhythmic ideas stretch, the music never abandons its responsibility to feel good.

A standout example of the trio’s shared understanding comes on “Dexterity.” Here, the trio takes a bebop framework and reshapes it with post-bop elasticity while keeping the groove firmly intact. The feel has a huge pocket for the conversational interaction, the time elastic but never unstable. This is where the trio’s collective knowledge shows clearly as they communicate in the style and with each other. Everyone knows when to lean in, when to lay back, and how to keep the blues language alive inside more complex structures.

The ballad side of the album reveals another dimension of the group’s chemistry. “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” opens with a solo guitar chordal statement that sets a reflective tone before the trio enters with sensitivity and groove. Space becomes as important as sound, and the room itself becomes a participant in the conversation. Recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio, the sound emphasizes warmth and cohesion rather than spectacle, allowing the trio’s internal clock to guide the performance.

By the time “Summer Night” closes the record, what lingers most is the groove. Long after the final notes fade, the feel stays with you. The trio has created a set of the kind of feels that make you smile, snap your fingers, and replay moments in your mind’s ear that settled perfectly into the pocket. Blue Fire – The Van Gelder Session  isn’t about reinvention or historical reenactment, it’s about swing and groove as a living force carried forward by musicians who understand that when the groove is right, everything else falls into place. Blue Fire – The Van Gelder Session rewards listeners who value feel, trust, and the enduring power of a trio locked deep into the pocket.