Here's a stomping Bluiett
electric group that will really get you moving.The
recipe for Bluiett's Barbeque Band is as follows: a powerful
from-the-church soul singer belting Wind Beneath My Wings and Precious Lord; a
keyboard funkmeister borrowed from George Clinton; an
18 voice children's choir; and an octave-defying bass sax transformation of Body
and Soul. Mix in Bluiett originals that crisscross
the lines between jazz, R&B, fusion and gospel. His group includes Calvin
Jones on electric bass, Ronnie Burrage on drums,
Donald Blackman on keyboard and Chief Bey on hand drums. This audiophilic
spectacular is a Fi SuperDisc.
1. Oasis/The Well (H. Bluiett)
2. Give Me The Rivers (S.LeFlore)
3. Bonitablu (H. Bluiett) -Listen to
Sample
4. The Wind Beneath My Wings (L.Henley & J.Silbar) -Listen to
Full Song
5. Wide Open (H. Bluiett)
6. Nana/Ena Brown (H. Bluiett)
7. Uluru/Dreamtime (H. Bluiett)
8. Precious Lord (T. Dorsey)
9. Body And Soul (Heyman,
Eyton & Green)
Hey now, it's party time! Grab some ribs and some brew
and get down with Bluiett's Barbecue Band! They do
pop, soul, funk, jazz and more: Just your average avant-gutbucket
backyard group.
And not only that, there's a group of kids to sing on
a tune dedicated to Bluiett's granddaughter's nanny,
poet Shirley LeFlore does her thing on Give Me
Rivers, and Amba Hawthorne slides right in to sing a couple. The band is
essentially a large and deeply funky rhythm section, with Bluiett's
baritone as the only horn and main soloist. The audiophile Mapleshade
production (custom A/D converters, minimum miking, no
mixing, filtering, compression, etc.) lands the listener right in the middle of
the ensemble, exactly where you want to be. The spirit is definitely here, from
the pure gospel of Georgia Tom Dorsey's Precious Lord to the closing bass
sax/electric piano duet (!) on Body And Soul. This one
is big fun, and warmly recommended. -Stuart Kremsky
Bariman Bluiett
blows his top and has big fun on this savory platter that employs electronic
instruments without condescending to common tastes. Best known for his sonorous
explorations with the World Saxophone Quartet, the New York-based baritone
master ennobles the African American oral tradition here, using the organ as
merely a point of departure. From the title, one expects an organ-drenched
recording in the manner of Jimmy Smith. Instead, while employing some organ and
other electric keyboards, Bluiett takes a decidedly
R&B- and gospel-oriented approach. Donald Blackman's keyboards, bolstered
by electric bass and both trap (Ronnie Burrage) and
hand (Chief Bey) drums, fan the flames of the leader's fervent improvising,
sometimes in the bari's customarily meaty low
registers and, at others, in the instrument's uppermost realms. There's
improvising aplenty and tasty grooves that leave no falsely cerebral
aftertaste. As such, Bluiett's Barbeque Band retains
an uncompromising crossover appeal. Slap on Oasis/The Well (8:16), Wide Open
(5:59) or Body And Soul (7:05, an unusual but
flavorful feature for bari) and be sure to lick all the
sauce off your fingers. -Gene Kalbacher
Pierre Sprey's Mapleshade Productions has emerged, in recent years, as one
of the very few labels that offers consistently first-rate sonics and
world-class musicians. The latest, Bluiett's Barbeque
Band, his fifth collaboration with Hamiet Bluiett, best-known as the baritone sax in the World
Saxophone Quartet, is one of both men's propulsive and unusual discs to date.
The Barbeque Band is an electric outfit, with Bluiett
backed by stacked-keyboards, electric bass and drums, supplemented occasionally
by hand-drums, a poet, a singer, and, on one song, a "choir" of
eighteen schoolkids. But read on, for it sounds like no fusion band you've ever
heard. Instead of plugging the electric instruments straight into a mixing
board, Sprey plugs them into amps -- the keyboards
into a Fender, the bass into an Ampeg, both
tube-powered and heavily modified -- and lets their sounds drift into the air,
where his customary wedged pair of PZM microphones picks them up along with the
rest of the room's molecules. You get a sense of spaciousness, depth and
transparency that makes you feel you're listening to this band live, in some
funky dive, where the food's hot and the crowd's hotter. The tunes range from
samba-ballad to free-funk to gospel to a sweet country reverie that features
those eighteen schoolchildren paying tribute to the departed nanny of Bluiett's granddaughter, and oh, lord!, wait till you hear
them shouting and whispering, so lifelike and distinct, you can count - and
practically see - every one of them.
The band sizzles. Bluiett covers his usual three or
four octaves on baritone, all of them dripping with soul and sauciness. The
final number finds him blowing Body And Soul on bass
saxophone -- one of the few times that anyone has dared play that unwieldy horn
in sustained melody. It's amazing enough when a musician pushes enough air
through it; Bluiett puts his heart through it, as
well. And Sprey lets you see how big and ornery the
horn is. One flaw: on the three songs that feature singer Amba Hawthorne, she
sometimes gets too close to the mike, triggering some overload. Otherwise, it's
as real a disc as Sprey has ever set down. Warning:
it begins with a very loud and nicely nasty honk. -Fred Kaplan
