Bassists: so often undervalued, so often ignored, so often the member with the least talent (see Sid Vicious and all he did for the bass-playing profession). But most people would argue that get the bass right, and the rest follows. John Frusciante and Anthony Kiedis may have the media-fuelling stories to tell, but a lot of people still feel that Flea is the rock around which The Red Hot Chili Peppers is built. The bass-playing on the John Mancini Band's self-titled debut, an album of jazz-fusion, taking in rock, alt-country, funk and reggae. Although described as a trio, the album features seven musicians, bringing cellos, saxophones, trumpets and a concertina.
The opening salvo of "Don't Go Easy" and "Lighthouse" (a brief instrumental interlude) gets things off on the right foot, and demonstrate David Wright's clearly impressive bass-technique. The band, which describes itself as a "jam-band but less disorganised", shows on "Don't Go Easy" a tight and clear understanding of where each member is going. With its shifty skiffle beat and alt-country fiddle, the track starts in blues-rock territory, before jam elements come to the fore: there's the obligatory guitar solo, trumpets popping up in support and nicely-executed bass flourishes before an abrupt finish. "Lighthouse", on the other hand, is a languid, laid-back instrumental in the west-coast-cool style. It feels like an interlude, which it is, but it doesn't suffer for it.
"Buried Alive", with its white-boy soul, reggae-lite feel to it could quite easily sit at the end of a small-town American indie drama. It's probably the poppiest on the album; no surprise then that it won an "honourable mention" in the annual Billboard World Song Contest. Indeed, reggae fusion (a taboo term in any music reviewer's vocabulary) makes a reappearance on the next track, in the enjoyable "Lost In Space". A smooth, ska-fused dose of brass-tinged funk, it successfully sidesteps the dangerous UB40 trap, but veers a little too close to naff, as (fortunately brief) "jazz-hands" musical faffing at the end sees the "jam-band" chickens come home to roost. It's a shame because it's a very nicely constructed song, which builds a patient progression around a single guitar riff until the whole song falls away in jazz-noodling.
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Unfortunately, the latter half of the album feels a little inconsequential, lacking the energy of the early tracks. The nadir is the misjudged "reinterpretation" of "All Along The Watchtower" (a brave choice regardless of the artist) which sees the band strip the track of its energy, its lyrics and its emotion before ramming it through a smooth, easy-listening filter. It comes out sounding like the audio equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, and worryingly, not a bit unlike Sting's "Englishman in New York". "Switchback" turns back towards the band's jazz-fusion roots, an instrumental that displays no little playing ability and once again that mutual understanding key to successful improvisation.
The album, an intriguing mix of jazz, rock, blues and reggae, highlights the best and worst that one can expect from fusion bands: an occasionally imaginative melding of genres, energetic and relaxed in equal measures, which unfortunately trips up on a couple of instances (the "All Along The Watchtower"-cover/"Andy Roam" debacle most notably). One gets the feeling that fewer genres and more development would have made for an album with a bit more identity.
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