Detroit musician, Blue Note artist and expressive saxophonist Dave McMurray’s fourth album for the label, I Love Life Even When I’m Hurting, sets out to celebrate his home town, and his own life, and life in general. Warren Zevon once said wisely: “Enjoy every sandwich.” McMurray would likely enjoy the whole loaf. The phrase “I love Life Even When I’m Hurting” was seeded and conceived in the wake of a lonely death of a friend who had succumbed in body and spirit to a long, isolating illness. Out of that pain comes the fuel of resilience – a fuel that ignites his music and sax-playing too.“Man, I love life even when I’m hurting,” he remembers telling himself at the time, and the album’s title, and its music rolled out from there.
Co-produced by McMurray and longtime collaborator Don Was, and recorded in Michigan’s Rustbelt Studios it features a cast of Detroit players including Was on bass, Luis Resto and Maurice O’Neal on keys, as well as guitarist Wayne Gerard and drummer Jeff Canady, and Detroit R&B singer Kem for an elegant Al Jarreau cover. Together they stoke some powerful rhythmic cross currents to match the saxophonist’s muscular flow.
It opens with “This Life” a short solo plea on sax under a confessional spoken word piece: “I sing a song the angels can’t sing. I live now and I pray for their vision over me...”. The first full-length track is the strikingly titled “The Jungaleers” (it’s Detroit thing), McMurray leading off over a tight, skipping rhythm section, funky guitar and rich horns, extending a line across the ocean to West African rhythms and melodies, reminiscent, almost, of the warmth of Orchestra Baobab with its fusion of Cuban percussions but with its native Detroit swing still intact.
The following “Just a Thought” is a slower, oozier ballad, McMurray’s sax seeping between the bars alongside an elegant electric keyboard line, while the title track is perhaps over-mellifluous, with a slinky 1980s feel. As for the 1975 Al Jarreau classic, “We Got By”, McMurray’s tender blows on saxophone and Kem’s silky vocals work go together like a horse and carriage.
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