By Joshua Myers | Published January 2026
Featuring a near perfect mixture of standard jazz tunes and popular musical mainstays, pianist Nat Adderley Jr.’s Took So Long is a fine trio album. The trio features two bassists (Belden Bullock and Chris Berger) and a revolving door of four drummers (Tommy Campbell, Vince Ector, Steve Johnson, Dwayne “Cook” Broadnax) over its 11 tracks but never loses its coherence.
The title track (the project’s lone original) is a dissertation on groove. As Bullock and Ector lock in, Adderley’s crisp playing over the mellow number provokes as much as it settles. This ethos carries the momentum of the entire project, allowing us to break with the assumptions that popular musics and jazz standards represent two distinct or different worlds. Despite what has happened in the industry over the last 50 years, we might remind ourselves there was once a moment where jazz was indeed popular music and the designation “pop” is a belated attempt to channel and perhaps cheaply reproduce the musicality contained in the instrumental forms of the previous generation.
But even if one is not concerned with all that, it is simply cool to hear once again how interpretations of sounds made famous by Stevie Wonder, The Stylistics, The Carpenters, Luther Vandross and Aretha Franklin beautifully coexist alongside those written by Billie Holliday and Dizzy Gillespie. Masters of the piano trio format have gamely plumbed these associations before. But in the hands of Nat Adderley Jr., we get yet another fresh look.
