STEVE GADD BAND - 70 Strong
BFM JAZZ – 302 062 429 2
Steve Gadd (drums) Walt Fowler (trumpet, flugelhorn) Larry Goldings (B3, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, accordion) Jimmy Johnson (five string electric bass) Michael Landau (acoustic and electric guitars)
Recorded at Unconscious Studios, Pacific Palisades, California, April 3rd to 9th 2014
Having reached the age of 70, Steve Gadd, reputedly the highest paid session drummer in the music industry, can look back on a career studded with achievement as the first call choice of the great and good of pop, rock and jazz music. You hear his simmering groove on records by Paul Simon, James Brown, Aretha Franklyn, James Taylor, and the Brecker Brothers: the list just goes on and on. The thing is though, as this superb session shows, he isn’t looking back; his music is happening and on this showing has a very bright future indeed.
This is his second recording with this particular band, a quintet of similarly gifted session men playing at the top of their game in a set of pieces that whilst inhabiting the genre we have come to describe as jazz /rock eschew it’s familiar clichés and banalities and apply their licks and riffs with a painterly finesse that is almost impressionistic in its restraint. Gadd has assembled an interesting instrumental mix for his combo achieving a fluid sound that flows around his mobile, variegated pulse. It is music rich in internal detail that comes over with a pellucid clarity but thanks to Gadd’s ever present momentum, whether conveyed by brush work, cymbal glosses or crisp snare accents, never drifts into aimlessness.
Gadd’s dream team consists of Walt Fowler, who with brothers Tom and Bruce, has done time with The Mothers of Invention appearing in some of Zappa’s most exciting instrumental adventures like `Roxy and Elsewhere` and `Make a Jazz Noise Here` . Then there is Larry Goldings , a long time associate of Michael Brecker and James Taylor, a musical colourist whose exquisite accordion playing on his stand out composition `Written in Stone` invokes the arid beauty of the Tex/Mex borderlands. Of Johnson and Landau I know less except that they too have paid their dues in elite company and are given ample opportunity in this recording to demonstrate the fruits of their labours both as instrumentalists and composers.
As regards the tunes themselves we are offered a satisfying varied bill of fare with the familiar – Eddie Harris’s `Freedom Jazz Dance` - sitting alongside originals of distinction that stay in the memory: some blues , a samba and a couple of jam band workouts that shimmer and simmer, rather than bump along in the same old groove, complete a programme that will delight with its manifold felicities . All this makes for a stunner of a recording which will be high on my list of favourites when we come to choose our year end ‘best of` discs.
Reviewed by Euan Dixon
BFM JAZZ – 302 062 429 2
Steve Gadd (drums) Walt Fowler (trumpet, flugelhorn) Larry Goldings (B3, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, accordion) Jimmy Johnson (five string electric bass) Michael Landau (acoustic and electric guitars)
Recorded at Unconscious Studios, Pacific Palisades, California, April 3rd to 9th 2014
Having reached the age of 70, Steve Gadd, reputedly the highest paid session drummer in the music industry, can look back on a career studded with achievement as the first call choice of the great and good of pop, rock and jazz music. You hear his simmering groove on records by Paul Simon, James Brown, Aretha Franklyn, James Taylor, and the Brecker Brothers: the list just goes on and on. The thing is though, as this superb session shows, he isn’t looking back; his music is happening and on this showing has a very bright future indeed.
This is his second recording with this particular band, a quintet of similarly gifted session men playing at the top of their game in a set of pieces that whilst inhabiting the genre we have come to describe as jazz /rock eschew it’s familiar clichés and banalities and apply their licks and riffs with a painterly finesse that is almost impressionistic in its restraint. Gadd has assembled an interesting instrumental mix for his combo achieving a fluid sound that flows around his mobile, variegated pulse. It is music rich in internal detail that comes over with a pellucid clarity but thanks to Gadd’s ever present momentum, whether conveyed by brush work, cymbal glosses or crisp snare accents, never drifts into aimlessness.
Gadd’s dream team consists of Walt Fowler, who with brothers Tom and Bruce, has done time with The Mothers of Invention appearing in some of Zappa’s most exciting instrumental adventures like `Roxy and Elsewhere` and `Make a Jazz Noise Here` . Then there is Larry Goldings , a long time associate of Michael Brecker and James Taylor, a musical colourist whose exquisite accordion playing on his stand out composition `Written in Stone` invokes the arid beauty of the Tex/Mex borderlands. Of Johnson and Landau I know less except that they too have paid their dues in elite company and are given ample opportunity in this recording to demonstrate the fruits of their labours both as instrumentalists and composers.
As regards the tunes themselves we are offered a satisfying varied bill of fare with the familiar – Eddie Harris’s `Freedom Jazz Dance` - sitting alongside originals of distinction that stay in the memory: some blues , a samba and a couple of jam band workouts that shimmer and simmer, rather than bump along in the same old groove, complete a programme that will delight with its manifold felicities . All this makes for a stunner of a recording which will be high on my list of favourites when we come to choose our year end ‘best of` discs.
Reviewed by Euan Dixon
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