Caleb Lumley

Big Beat: Sounds Good, Feels Good

by Jack Bowers
November 9, 2019

So what can be reported about Big Beat, an eighteen-piece ensemble from New Jersey whose debut album, Sounds Good, Feels Good, is more pop / rock than jazz, more “hip / contemporary" than straight-ahead / traditional? First, that the band certainly Sounds Good as a unit, skating easily through an assortment of backbeat-heavy themes that consist in large measure of full-throated riffs by brass and reeds and requisite exclamation points from drummer Joe Spinelli. On the other hand, there's not ...