The Daniel Bennett Group “The Deconstructed Songbook” (LP)

The Daniel Bennett Group offers one inspiring answer to what it means to own someone else’s song across the seven tracks of The Deconstructed Songbook, his latest project and arguably his most ambitious. The source material spans several decades and genres, Wes Montgomery, Horace Silver, Sam Rivers, Joni Mitchell, Harold Arlen, Lennon and McCartney, alongside Bennett’s own compositions, yet the album never reads as a survey course. Instead, it functions as something rarer; a musician holding an extended conversation with his own influences, speaking back to them in a language they might not fully recognize.

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Nat Janoff announces the album’s intentions with is guitar work on Montgomery’s “Road Song” which doesn’t replicate the original so much as shadow it, circling the melody from oblique angles before stepping directly into the light. Montgomery’s spirit is present throughout, but Janoff earns his place in the room. It’s a bold opening statement, and the band locks in accordingly.

Bennett’s own “The Town Supervisor” arrives without disrupting the albums momentum, which is worth noting. Original compositions sandwiched between iconic material can sometimes expose a gap in quality, but Bennett’s saxophone here is entirely at home, trading phrases with Jason Yeager’s piano in a push-and-pull that sounds genuinely spontaneous. Yeager, for that matter, is quietly one of the album’s most consistent forces, his playing measured and melodically inventive throughout.

Horace Silver’s “Nica’s Dream” leans into that balance further, with Janoff’s guitar lines weaving through the familiar harmonic structure without crowding it. By this point, roughly midway through the record, a listener begins to understand the group philosophy; reconstruction here doesn’t mean dismantling. It means examining the load-bearing walls and deciding which ones actually need to stay.

Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” is where said philosophy faces its stiffest test. The song is so deeply embedded in cultural memory that any new interpretation risks either reverence or irrelevance. Bennett threads the needle. The arrangement breathes differently than Mitchell’s, harmonically generous, finding emotional weight in places the original left open, instead of retracing its steps.

Harold Arlen’s “My Shining Hour” brings some of Bennett’s most focused saxophone work on the album, precise without being cold, and Janoff again proves indispensable in the lower registers of the arrangement. Sam Rivers’ “Beatrice” comes with a lighter touch, almost deliberately muted, the band demonstrating range by pulling back rather than pushing forward.

The Beatles “Here, There and Everywhere” finishes off the album, and it lands without irony or over-statement. Bennett treats it as a melody worth protecting, and the group obliges. The Deconstructed Songbook succeeds because it never mistakes familiarity for permission. These are not covers executed out of admiration alone. They are arguments, thoughtful, musically integral and occasionally brilliant, about what these songs were always capable of becoming.

Mark Druery