Customer Reviews

By Any Means Necessary

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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I transcribed the title tune when this came out on vinyl. My brain has not yet recovered. Very few modern musicians have pushed the boundaries in a musical way like Mr Thomas and also as a brilliant tenor sax player with his own sound. This is a wicked baaad disc, super funky, great angular writing, soloing and not one clique "lick" to be found. Pushing music forward in the best possible way. Scofield and Chambers are brilliant ...

Hahahahahaha!... Stuff like this floors me. Amazon, and many other sites, seem like they don't want to make money these days. I searched all over the place to figure out how to sample this disc (all kinds of download sites, etc.) and could not find anything. -I got into Thomas' music via Greg Osby and Steve Coleman and desperately wanted to buy this... assuming I had *some* idea of what it sounded like. Well, (and this is the primary point of this review) if you scroll down a ways, you'll find the 1991 *vinyl* release of this album, which I imagine is loooooong out of print (there aren't even any outside sellers who have it available currently). Amazon's album samples are there! lol =D This cracks me up! They have samples... just attached to an item they can not possibly make money off of. Hilarious!

Anyway, I finally got a copy, and it's pretty good... but not stunning. Greg Osby (who is also on this disc) blows me away, and I really like anything Steve Coleman has done with Dave Holland, as well as most of his solo stuff. Gary is often mentioned in the same breath as Greg and Steve (as they collectively built a style of new modern jazz), but I've yet to find anything by him as brilliant as the work of his peers. There's definitely some good playing here. My complaint is that the disc as a whole lacks dynamics. A lot of the drumming is more rock style than jazz, which would be O.K., if you had a guy like Chad Wackerman sitting in the drum seat. While I'm a fan of other projects for which Dennis Chambers has played, I don't find his playing here inspired. Several of the tracks get halfway in without any change in feel. This is definitely more of a "groove" album than a jazz one... rhythmically speaking. If you're O.K. with that, it's definitely a good listen.

If you're just getting into M-base influenced music, definitely check out the following discs first:

Strata Institute-
"Transmigration"

Greg Osby -
"Inner Circle"
"Symbols Of Light"
"Channel Three"
"Zero"
"Friendly Fire" w/Joe Lovano

Steve Coleman-
"Resistance Is Futile"
"Motherland Pulse"
"Black Science"

Dave Holland-
"Extensions"
"Triplicate"

Vijay Iyer-
"Reimagining"
"Tragicomic"
"Panoptic Modes"

Rudresh Mahanthappa-
"Dual Identity"
"Mother Tongue"
"Codebook"