Yes, I know it's not pop. But we haven't got a "jazz" category.
This album is, however, lots of fun. It looks and sounds like a labour of love for a well-established local pro musician who sets high standards and has enough talent to cross an ocean or two.
Joseph Patrick Moore is a jazz bass player from Powder Springs, Georgia with an ear for popular taste and some pretty cool friends. The recordings were mostly done in Georgia, with a little excursion to Nashville for reasons undeclared.
Your casual listener would be grabbed, lapel- and ear-wise, by the chuckling version of MEN AT WORK'S "Down Under" and a fresh-sounding retake on Dammers' classic "Ghost Town" that open the set. After that trip into the pop repertoire, jazz roots reassert themselves in gently persuasive ways. Funk, gypsy violin, some laptop noodling, more funk, some jamming. And a couple of big works with something to say.
Moore's own larger pieces "Groove Messenger (The Story of Jazztronica) and "Jamband Express" stand out for me.
"Groove Messenger is a familiar-sounding but still effective muted trumpet, cool groove thing with some polyrhythmic business and a haunting female vocal at the back. "Jamband Express" is a bass heavy, lilting and driving piece that shifts through a whole set of moods and rhythms with a distant and scary flugelhorn played by El Buho.
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A tribute to Herbie Hancock "Herbie" sounds too reverential and emulo-jazz for my taste. A bit like a final year jazz student performance piece, maybe, but showing off JPM's very dextrous upright playing, interspersed (a little artificially?) with some Stanley Clarke-like funk wizardry. But give the man the job ... it’s showboat stuff.
A nice thread in the album comes from Tim Ussery's sparky mandolin playing. Cheerfully odd and genuinely interesting on "One Thing Leads to Another", it skats along in most of the tunes and never gets in the way. Vance Thompson's trumpet is also worth a mention. Drums/percussion from Ben Taylor, Count M'butu, Larry Blewitt, Emrah Kotan and Jeff Sipe are consistently flawless. A couple of sampled interjections, especially on closer "Pause#5 (Pause for Peace)" or in the unnecessary newsreader intro to "Heavy Things" are a bit contrived and really only distract attention form the music.
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