June 2000

From the Inside Out
Archive

2 0 0 1 Joel Dorn Jack Costanzo Sammy Davis Jr. Miles Davis 2000 Rewind Jimmy Smith 2 0 0 0 Floating World/Talking Drum Requiem For A Heavyweight The Majesty of Ra Summer Photographs Arturo Sandoval Koko Taylor Jimmy McGriff Ubiquity Records Loving the Bomb AfriCaribbean Jazz Old Friends And New Discovering Cuba Grammy 2000 Never Can Say Goodbye 1 9 9 9 Livin La Musica Buena Jazz and Electronica California Dreamin' Continual Pulsation Five Decades of Prestige Summertime Blues Musical Adventures International Jazz Day Love Learns to Dance Quincy Jones

By Chris M. Slawecki

It’s generally agreed – certainly in the pages of AAJ, at least – that jazz deserves wider recognition.

Ask why more people don’t listen to jazz, and you sometimes hear words to this effect: Jazz is "old" music that seems to always present the same old combinations of instruments playing the same old set of tunes over and over. How many different saxophone versions of "Body And Soul" do you really need to hear?

So perhaps one way of attracting fresher and younger listeners to jazz would be to introduce new instruments and phrases to the jazz lexicon. In recent years, such bands as Phish, Widespread Panic, Blues Traveler, and The Dave Matthews Band, have helped popularize the concept of rock "jam bands" – a rock movement loosely (very loosely) based upon similar sentiments about loosening the music up and exploring alternatives.

For the past few years, jazz seems to have been wriggling like an amoeba into a slippery and popular direction with a "jam band" movement of its own. Groove Collective, Medeski Martin & Wood, Greyboy, and other precursors carved the creekbed, and now bands such as The Jazz Mandolin Project and Liquid Soul help keep a dynamic and sparkling river flowing through.

Just about the only thing that Liquid Soul and The Jazz Mandolin Project have in common is that they’re both featured in the column you’re reading right here, and that their current music captures the spirits of diversity and freedom, a considerable part of the entire freewheeling, sprawling jam band charm.

Here’s The Deal presents the third album from Liquid Soul, Chicago’s legendary firebreathing jazz, soul, funk, R&B, and rock dragon that has been torching Windy City clubs for the past decade. Let’s see if we can pick up the theme here:

"Chicago’s Liquid Soul is the funkiest band in the world" -- Reuters
"Steady-grooving funk" -- The New York Times
"Liquid Soul is the tightest and funkiest outfit in America" -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Liquid Soul is the future of funk" -- Austin American Statesman (documenting the band’s performance at the South By Southwest Festival)

Quoth saxophonist and bandleader Mars Williams, "Our goal is to throw a party every time we hit the stage, creating a groove that hits people right in the ass and makes them dance. We’ve outlasted genres and trends – what we play is simply Liquid Soul music, which is about groove and atmosphere."

Jazz credentials? Deal lays ‘em out with a cover of Miles’ Kind of Blue classic "All Blues" and a tribute to that firebrand trumpeter so fond of African, Cuban, Latin, and jazz rhythms, "The Diz." Those cool chords in "All Blues" have rarely sounded this upbeat and Sly Stone wicked; of course, they’ve rarely been thumped out by such a fat bassline, too, thanks to bassist Ricky Showalter’s express train to Graham Central Station. "The Diz" detonates an explosion of flaming horns and peppery percussion, a tribute worthy of its subject.

Here’s The Deal sure drops that funk b-o-m-b, too. If you’re familiar with the jazz, funk, soul, hip-hop and Caribbean stylings of Groove Collective, imagine that sound – but not as soft and rounded, with more of a hard, Chicago urban edge. My fourteen year old son walked into our home as the end of "Sure Fire One" grooved into the beginning of "The Diz." He smiled and said with soft surprise, his head nodding to the beat, "I’m liking this, I’m liking this…"

That opener, "Sure Fire One" sets the blistering standard for the rest of this set. You’ve almost gotta love a song that arrives just in time for summer when it includes a lyric about mixing up suicides at the 7-11 and nods to LL Cool J’s "Jingling Baby," mixed in a whipcrack horn-stoked groove that sounds like Maceo Parker bustin’ up the joint with a wolfpack of 20-year-olds on spring break.

There aren’t many other records that sound quite like The Jazz Mandolin Project’s Xenoblast, a trio with bassist Chris Dahlgren and drummer Ari Hoenig led by mandolinist Jamie Masefield. The JMP has performed on bills with MM&W and bring to the jazz "jam bands" set a sense of pure instrumental musicality. Their style seems best described as a melding of Bela Fleck with The Mahavishnu Orchestra; full of impossible, gorgeous, galloping rhythms and warp-speed sound.

In 1996, Masefield released an eponymous debut by the first version of the JMP, featuring bassist Stacy Starkweather and drummer Gabe Jarrett, the son of pianist-composer Keith Jarrett. A live recording, Tour de Flux, followed in 1999 from the second JMP, Masefield with bassist Dahlgren with drummer Jon Fishman (of Phish). Xenoblast is the band’s debut for the jazz equivalent of the holy grail, Blue Note Records.

Masefield wasn’t drawn to jazz by the traditional or even usual route, by first appreciating first the instrumental accomplishments of bluegrass artists such as David Grisman or even Bill Monroe. "I’m an oddball from every angle," he allows. "I have no bluegrass in my background. I started on the tenor banjo playing in Dixieland jazz bands, so I’m playing barre chords that bluegrass mandolin players can’t make any sense out of at all. The mandolin, obviously, doesn’t have much of a legacy within the jazz tradition, so I’m kind of just feeling my way in the dark all the time."

"I’ve been focusing a lot more on jazz and also classical music in my writing now," Masefield suggests. "It’s very contrapunal stuff, like a three-way conversation." Xenoblast is in many ways a well-played jazz guitar session based upon the interplay between the trio. The result of Masefield’s approach to his instrument suggests the music of pianist Chick Corea, mixing ripples of European, Latin, romantic, cool, bop, modern and timeless music.

Masefield finds plenty of jazz sounds in his mandolin: His opening to "The Milliken Way" sounds like a sea chanty played on banjo, and he closes this song with some energetically strummed heartland Americana that suggests Pat Metheny, who also comes to mind in the warm country sunshine on "Shaker Hill." Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio helps rave up "Hang Ten" with plenty of metallic shards and sparks.

"Spiders" constructs a contrapunal multi-layered web of surprising power and conjures up some of the sound and spirit of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in its kaleidoscopic closing jam, with the mandolin even assuming the sound of the violin played on such classics as The Inner Mounting Flame by Jerry Goodman. Mandolin also plays this part in "Igor," a tribute to Stravinsky that soars and rumbles like birds in flight slicing through a night sky lit up by an electric storm

In "Dromedary," Masefield suggests the classic "Moment’s Notice" with its butterfly tag line that seems to double back upon itself to arrive right where it starts from. Dahlgren and Hoenig stomp deeper in the heavy funk, too – especially Hoenig, who begins with martial drumming but then slowly slithers into New Orleans jazz.

Man, what’s this band gonna sound like after Masefield figures out how to switch those lights on?