Reddish Fetish: Llegue

Once the opening number is discounted as an anomaly, Llegue (pronounced yeh-geh) is a generally pleasing debut recording by the New Jersey-based Reddish Fetish octet, led by drummer Jason Reddish and featuring the Jersey City All-Stars. Reddish Fetish is the fresh incarnation of a group established in the late 1960s by the leader's father, saxophonist Bill Reddish, that blended elements of jazz, rock, avant-garde and world music (as does its present-day replica) to produce its own personal sound. But that earlier band, centered in South Florida, was never recorded.

Llegue has several meanings in Spanish, one of which is "arrives" (the preferred translation here). It may also mean "crash," "bump," "hit" or "reach," none of which would be out of place when applied to Reddish Fetish. The group traverses eleven themes, but arriving at its destination involves several bumps, hits, reaches, and perhaps even a crash or two. Once Alice Coltrane's strange and meandering "Journey Into Satchidananda" is out of the way, matters become far more stable, with credible readings of Jerome Kern's heartfelt "All the Things You Are" and jazz standards by Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Billy Strayhorn and Charlie Parker, along with the traditional favorite "Greensleeves" (a.k.a. "What Child Is This"), here renamed "5 Sleeves."

The group is effective across the board, with trim solos along the way by tenor saxophonist Ben Golder-Novick, violinist Sean David Cunningham, guitarist Jason Green and Reddish. There are two vocals, by J Hacha De Zola, on Silver's "Senor Blues" and Strayhorn's "Lush Life." After which, as if to show the opening number was no fluke, the group closes with the leader's aberrant "Shango Can Fly," which opens with an oft-repeated drum phrase, adds violin and piano, then veers well off course into a melodic thicket that presumably makes perfect sense to the musicians as it undoubtedly will have many listeners wondering what happened and why.

There are a number of pleasurable moments on Llegue, sandwiched between the peculiar opening and closing numbers. And the musicianship is first-class. In sum, a pretty good session marred by a couple of erratic musical choices.

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