Customer Reviews

The African Game

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jazz is packed to the brim with eccentrics. Some, Monk, Mingus, are famous. Coltrane and Coleman--so inventive in their uniqueness, they start revolutions where everyone tried sounding like them.

Others you can study jazz for decades and not come across. George Russel is one. Dispute me? How many albums have titles like the elwctro-avant-swing of Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature-1968. (That's your "add to cart cue.")

African Game came in the 1980s on Blue Note, long after its golden era of exquisite hard bop with free jazz flirtations. The album is not quite the experiment of Electric Sonata, but uses African beats, 1980s keyboards, and extremely complex but extremely creamy harmonics. There is a drive here that steers all this advanced composition to funk--delectably digestible even on first listen.

Most miraculous, how many albums with 80s production do you hear now and need to work past the gleam before actually figuring if the music is any good.

But on African Game, the style serves the music. That early digital, perhaps over-buffered Reagen era style actually serves to highlight the harmonic magic Russell works here. Put it against any Herbie or Miles (except Aura, which functions on the same premise,) of the period, and its no contest.

"The African Game" is also available on "The 80th Birthday Concert" (Concept), Mr. Russell's last recording. Also on the double cd are "Electronic Sonata" and "It's About Time," the maestro's last composition. Brilliant!!! The 80th Birthday Concert

FIVE STAR RECOMMENDATION! Russell's vital analitical conception of the meta-historical movements of musical evolution and mankind's struggle... An earlier album from 1956, and similarly addressing the chaos, was produced by Mingus on Atlantic as the classic "Pithecanthropus Erectus"... Equally interesting and worthy of study!