AsidesSome Came Running by Glenn Kenny

Music writing, slight return

By July 5, 2012January 12th, 20266 Comments

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At MSN Music, a scorch­ing N.Y.C. per­form­ance by Spectrum Road—from left, John Medeski, Vernon Reid, Cindy Blackman Santana, and Jack Bruce—occasions, among oth­er things, some con­sid­er­a­tion of what for the moment I’ll call the oth­er “F” word. Enjoy, I hope. (N.b., at the time of this post­ing there were a few wonky typos [my fault] in the sixth graf, but they’re being fixed.)

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6 Comments

  • Escher says:
    July 5, 2012 at 9:47 am

    what a cast! it’s like the music­al equi­val­ent of RED.
    (also not to be stin­ted: Jack Bruce’s awe­some col­lab­or­a­tions w/Kip Hanrahan, par­tic­u­larly “Desire Develops an Edge” and “Vertical’s Currency”)

  • preston says:
    July 5, 2012 at 11:41 am

    Man, I saw the advert for this walk­ing through Times Sq last week but due to work had to miss. (Also missed the Zappa Plays Zappa in LI) Quite a week­end for live music. Great piece, I really enjoy your music writ­ing as well.

  • James Keepnews says:
    July 5, 2012 at 2:09 pm

    Wow, I am lit­er­ally moments away from going and pick­ing up a t‑shirt I ordered loc­ally, emblazoned with the cov­er to Emergency!, so tim­ing proves once more to be everything in com­edy. And Spectrum Road has a fine cov­er story/interview in this month’s Downbeat, wherein Ms. Blackman-Santana avers that Mr. WIlliams nev­er used the term “fusion” for his work in the music he truly pion­eered, pre­fer­ring the term “jazz-rock”. A dis­tinc­tion, per Mr. Bang, without a dif­fer­ence? Don’t know, don’t care – for my money, “jazz-rock-fusion” begins and ends with the Tony Williams Lifetime, end­ing not long after Mr. Bruce ske­daddled (sp?) from the group after per­form­ing an uncred­ited vocal on “Two Worlds” for the album Ego.
    Dreadful sorry to have missed SR’s NYC gig and Mr. Rypdal, as well. But delighted to see MSN pub­lish­ing your superb music writ­ing. Will you tell them your fans would like to see them let you do more of it? Thanks.

  • Brian says:
    July 5, 2012 at 7:50 pm

    Thanks for the heads-up on this, Glenn. I was a big fan of Living Colour grow­ing up, and also enjoyed Reid’s solo stuff, so I’m really look­ing for­ward to hear­ing this new record.

  • Dollarama3k says:
    July 8, 2012 at 11:52 pm

    Damn. Hate to have missed this.

  • Henry Holland says:
    July 20, 2012 at 1:30 am

    I really wanted to see this band –Jack Bruce inspired me to play bass gui­tar– but their Los Angeles date was at the Playboy Jazz Festival, which isn’t my cup of mocha java. Damn.
    It’s too bad that the two Lifetime albums sound like they were recor­ded with the mic on a cheap cas­sette record­er, there’s some great music on them.
    “Fusion” is an OK term for me, until it starts to mean “Fuzak” (fusion + muzak) in the late 70’s. I love the RTF album “Romantic Warrior”, for example, and will always be a huge fan of the ori­gin­al lineup of The Mahavishnu Orchestra so it’s not all bad Grover Washington and any Kenny G album.