@stuartk ,
Thank you for your post.
You are a very astute listener (I believe you are also a musician). Your posts make it obvious that you have very good ears and understanding of the music, so no apology necessary for your discernment. Quite the contrary. I always appreciate your posts as well. A couple of “fine tunings” to what I wrote previously.
I did not at all say that Potter’s style has a “dominant Jazz/Rock sensibility”. I wrote “hints of a Jazz/Rock sensibility”. Btw, to have some Jazz/Rock sensibility is not a negative at all in my book. It is the reality of where the music went over the course of the last four or five decades. If one listens to Michael Brecker, broadly considered to be the greatest of the post-Coltrane tenor players one can hear a similarity in Potter’s tone and more subtly in his inflections. (Brecker, who was very prominent in the Jazz/Rock and Pop genres as well as mainstream Jazz was a huge influence on tenor players of the last five decades or so). As opposed to, for instance, Joe Lovano, a contemporary of both Brecker and Potter who has a decidedly different tone approach. Warmer and less aggressive and at times ethereal as opposed to the “horn about to split at the seams” tone approach that characterizes most post-Coltrane players.
Early(ish) Brecker with the recently posted guitarist Jack Wilkins. This record was posted here a couple of years ago:
https://youtu.be/WyqcP03Mj9s?si=DXk4HxfmSZz_PiB1