jazz Archives - Eli Moore

Eli Reviews: TomCat – Tom Scott and the L.A. Express (1974)

Tom Scott is THE session musician. If you’ve heard saxophone in the 1970s, you’ve heard him. When he was only 20 years old, Quincy Jones was already talking about him, how he could ‘play any idiom’. He’s the Jazz Man on Carole King’s classic paean, and the horn section arranger on Steely Dan’s Aja, even the funny electronic sounding melody that turns out is a Lyricon on Billie Jean.

I was excited to see some of his records are on Spotify. Sometimes Spotify has gaps – also depending on country – and I’m sure at one point I couldn’t access one of his records with his own band The L.A. Express. This one has cool cover art that I also find funny because I’ve had a recent run of jazz fusion discoveries, all with humanoid animals on the cover, that have turned out to be AI created. Tom Scott was an early adopter of the electronic wind instrument, the afore-mentioned Lyricon, but is all real. Guy can play anything.

TomCat is a solid jazz funk fusion record. It goes around rock and bop and blues and shuffle elements and features great playing all-round – I like this keyboard player a lot, Larry Nash – but I can’t say I really loved it. Usually I’m out and about or at the gym when taking in my album listening and will be regularly checking my phone for track titles if I’m digging it. I didn’t do that until the ballad “Love Poem”, which features Scott as the entire horn and woodwind section. I also did go back and saved “Day Way” before it to my Transcription playlist for the really cool, angular language of the melody, but I think the more interesting stuff is in the latter half, with a rock-edge TV news intro sort of track, “Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America & All The Ships” that Robben Ford really tears up.

“Backfence Cattin’” is mostly a cool funk groove in 3/4 that then pulls some clever metric switches. “Mondo” is pretty heavy, and Scott switches back to the synthesizer-sounding Lyricon for a rip. The last tune, “Refried”, is probably my favorite, at least for the intro groove, which I’m sure must have been sampled many a time. It’s a mostly dark tune and full of all that 1970s recording grit and richness I love so much. Unfortunately this is the only 70s from him available on Spotify, but I’m definitely going to hear him pop up soon enough in my music listening explorations – the guy really was on everything.

1970s, 1974, funk, jazz, Larry Nash, Tom Scott

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Eli Reviews: First Cuckoo – Deodato (1975)

I haven’t been mentioning that I also love Deodato’s album covers. I didn’t even see the figure of the woman with baby carriage until blowing it up big here.

This one’s a real mix and not such a clear concept, also with a lot more cover songs than the two others I’ve listened to – four out of the seven tracks, in fact. I like this one more than Knights of Fantasy and less than Love Island, and it’s again testament of how much Deodato can do as a musician. Steve Gadd is the only other musician on the record I know and he of course lays down the faultless grooves throughout.

“Funk Yourself” is a fun enough funk bash, probably great to kick your time on the treadmill off with. For me though, nothing beats Herbie Hancock’s “Hang Up Your Hang Ups”. It’s the next gamble that really pays off though: Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”. Deodato’s band actually delivers a metrically better performance, not rushing that one bit of the riff…it’s got enough gnarl to it that it comes off really well when it might not have.

The next track is to be one of my all-time favorite Deodato tracks, I’m sure: “Crabwalk”. Arranging and conducting your own stuff becomes a really amazing credit when there’s such large instrumentation like this. What a great writer. Great composition. There’s a tolerable dub element with the delays on the trumpet lead, but the lush 70s orchestration style is the real star here.

“Adam’s Hotel” is a super fun tune that were it recorded a little different would fit in some scenes of Napoleon Dynamite. I don’t know if I’m trying too hard to self-promote here but it’s a vibe I was going for with my track (as EM/FM) “Into Atlantis”. What I really want to take from Deodato is his deft management of composition and arrangement. His tunes develop and lengthen without feeling either convoluted (like Bob James for me) or uninteresting (like the Jazz Crusaders for me).

The funky boogaloo version of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” isn’t bad but I don’t need to ever hear it again. This guy really likes doing covers. I love his version of “Speak Low” though – another jazz standard – and I about hiccuped reading in the credits that the lyricist for the tune was actually Ogden Nash, my favorite poet.

The album ends with a classical piece by Delius, the title track basically, but I don’t know what Deodato did to it as it’s un-jazzified. He would have been pushing even his luck trying to make Cuckoo into a funk.

1970s, 1975, Deodato, funk, jazz, Steve Gadd, synthesizers

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Eli Reviews: Lyle Mays – Lyle Mays (1986)

I had possibly a spiritual experience listening to this album in a pool one night, on my iPhone speaker. Surely an improper means to listen to art but that’s good the mix and music are that I could be as absorbed as I was.

This falls in with my 80s EM/FM-related obsession as my jazz background found it’s way more into Quixote than it did Ship Life, for some reason. The digital synth tones on this record marry so well with Mays’ piano language, and though I liked the intro track “Highland Aire”, it was “Teiko” that transported me. The reverbs used are so cosmic sounding, and with the unusual combination of world musics and sparkly synth and soprano sax, it reminded me of one bit from the anime Cowboy Bepop.

I was only vaguely aware of Pat Metheny for the longest time, playing a few of his tunes in college and making note to follow up on his discography some day. I only ended up doing that last year and became aware of Lyle Mays and his beautiful piano language. I’m overdue to do some transcribing of his playing. He’s basically the piano version of Pat Metheny as far as I can tell, fluent and virtuosic in jazz vocab but with a passion for this more folk mode of playing (I believe I’d heard Metheny use that word this way) by which I mean things like double plagal cadences and sus 2 chords, diatonic scale runs and more triadic thinking.

The use of such big reverbs is kind of an 80s thing but for jazz, I feel like this could have been contentious. Solo piano track “Mirror of the Heart” has so much reverb on it that it almost become a second instrument on the recording. It’s beautiful. “Northern Lights” is another one that took me to the stars, with it’s held synth string note and repeated soft plucky synth motif, acoustic piano and double bass dancing around the digital elements.

This galactic combination of jazz and synthesizer was something I was reaching for with my own track “Per Aspera Ad Astra”. I’m still in awe of how much texture, power and width synthesizers can give a composer who doesn’t have access to a traditional orchestra.

“Slink” has an immaculate and very modern piano solo and “Invocation” has some beautiful synth in it but “Ascent” and “Close to Home” arrest me a lot more. The latter is such a gorgeous end to the record and might become my first Lyle Mays transcription.

1980s, jazz, Lyle Mays, synthesizers

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Eli Reviews: Love Island – Deodato (1978)

I’m on a fanatic run of Deodato. I exercised a lot of musical fanaticism last year when I had resolved to listen to album a day, falling even more in love with Herbie Hancock, George Duke and discovering then obsessing over Japanese artists Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea.

Eumir Deodato is blowing me away – composer, arranger and killer keyboardist. My only exposure to him before somehow coming across this album was through his famous funk rendition of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which I think I first heard in the Peter Sellers movie Being There. It seems to have been a habit of his to include at least one unusual cover on his albums. On this one, it’s a surprisingly tasty lounge funk version of Take the “A” Train.

This one and an Edwin Starr tune called “Chariot of the Gods” are sort of disruptive inclusions as it’s otherwise a concept album of island-themed music, almost more in the 60s lounge music/jet-setter/exotica trend but with 70s hallmarks like Rhodes keyboard, synthesizer, funk guitar, drums and farty bass (that’s a good thing). It’s lush with soft brass on two of my favorite tunes, “Tahiti Hut” and “Love Island”, and funks hard on the two intro tracks, and then “Pina Colada” later one – there’s some funky jazzy legends across the record, including Harvey Mason, Larry Carlton, George Benson and even Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

The writing is just so good across the record. All the songs are deftly written, with really engaging arrangements and expert solos. Deodato uses a crazy trombone sounding vocal effect (listed as ‘vocalanger’ on one set of credits) for a solo on “Love Island” and elsewhere takes super interesting Rhodes solos.

I’m super-inspired by this guy – stay tuned for more Deodato!

1970s, 1978, Deodato, funk, jazz