| What's Does It Sound Like? |
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Perhaps to prepare the listener for the experimentation to come, the first two tracks on the CD are a bit subdued. They feature traditional, warm jazz guitar dueting with a sax, in a clean, well-mixed sound with a surprisingly wide stereo spread. Track three, "Looking Up", features, breezy, George Benson-ish guitar tones and melodies over what sounds to me like looped percussion. The tune's bridge features Thomas playing Pat Metheny-like digitally delayed tones on his clean, warm electric guitar. It's on track four that things begin to really get interesting, sonically speaking. |
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On "Breeze On A
Bay", Thomas and crew take off to India, in a track whose
combination of tabla drums and acoustic guitars is very reminiscent of
John McLaughlin's mid-1970s pioneering jazz-raga fusion with the group
Shakti, but with a much more accessible melody than McLaughlin's modal
mazes. An alto sax solo gives way to a complex synthesized tone,
reminiscent of some of Steve Winwood's keyboard solos of his Arc of
a Diver period. It could very well be Thomas on a guitar synth, of
course! Track seven,
"Way-farther", begins with rain and wind loops for its
opening, which give way to nice acoustic and clean electric guitar.
There's a nice analog guitar-synth sound, very reminiscent of some of
McLaughlin's work in the early-1980s, when he fronted a band whose
keyboard player was armed with an early Synclavier synthesizer. The second to last
track, "Babes In Toyland" is just that, as Thomas and his
ensemble weave acoustic and digitally delayed electric guitars through
a maze of digital effects. Then there are echoes of some of Jimmy
Page's raga-rock (think "White Summer" and "Black
Mountain Side"), until the track culminates in samples of
children's voices and another guitar-synth patch. Music That
Ingratiates With Its Listener I've made several
comparisons to John McLaughlin in this review. But it's unfair to say
that Thomas is strictly a McLaughlin clone. For one thing, Thomas's
playing is more eclectic--if only because he doesn't need to prove, as
McLaughlin seemingly must on every CD, that he can fit 72,392 notes
into a single bar of music. Jaz-Mobi's music ingratiates itself with the listener. And any jazz CD that combines great guitar playing, accessible melodies and rich digital recording strategies is a rare thing, and The Jaz-Mobi Project's CD is well-worth checking out for that very reason. Its subtle layers of sound may need a few listens to fully reveal themselves to you. But that's OK--this is a CD that holds up quite nicely to repeated playing. |