Tenor saxist Franz Jackson constitutes a living chunk of jazz history. He grew up playing jazz as handed down by Louis Armstrong, then worked with a rogue’s gallery of the swing era’s most colorful bandleaders, including Roy Eldridge, Fats Waller, and Fletcher Henderson, and as a mainstay of Earl Hines’s Grand Terrace Orchestra (based here in Chicago). Yet despite his resume, Jackson refuses to become a museum piece: his unprepossessing personality and ingenuous energy ride roughshod over most genre-specific considerations. Jackson plays old music, but this music was new when he first played it, and it comes out of Jackson’s horn gleaming with the creators’ stamp; these days it also comes with a relaxed and informative running commentary by Jackson himself, placing many of the tunes into historical context while avoiding any sense of a lecture. Since turning 80 (!) a few years ago, Jackson has learned to conserve his strength a bit by replacing his trademark tenor with the less physically strenuous clarinet, from which he extracts a deep gulf-coast tone that approaches the consistency of molasses (a la one more of his former employers, the oft-forgotten Jimmy Noone). But he doesn’t stint at all when it comes to his exuberant vocals, crackerjack
