Skip to main content

Classic Recordings: Yellowjackets – Like a River

Ten tracks from a band that has been together for over forty years and has never made a lazy record. Like a River is the one with the Brazilian heart.

Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets formed in Los Angeles in 1977 out of guitarist Robben Ford's band and have been recording continuously ever since, with keyboardist Russell Ferrante as the constant. They have won multiple Grammys and something like thirty nominations.

They get filed as fusion or contemporary jazz, and both labels undersell them. This is a band with serious compositional ambition — the writing is dense, the metres shift, and the arrangements reward close attention in a way that the smooth-jazz shelf does not prepare you for.

Like a River (1993) features bassist Jimmy Haslip, saxophonist Bob Mintzer and drummer William Kennedy, and is among their most atmospheric records.

What to listen for

"Man Facing North" is the standout and the most unusual thing here. It features Naná Vasconcelos, the Brazilian percussionist who was one of the great musicians of the twentieth century — a master of the berimbau, the single-string bow used in capoeira, and a collaborator with Pat Metheny, Egberto Gismonti and Don Cherry. His presence changes the whole texture of the record.

"My Old School" is the Steely Dan song, and taking it on is a considerable statement — Steely Dan's own records were made by the best session players in America, so covering them is competing on their turf.

"Dewey (For Miles)" is the tribute. Miles Davis's middle name was Dewey; he had died two years earlier.

"River Waltz" and "Azure Moon" are the most compositionally ambitious, and "Suenos" the most Latin-inflected.

"Solitude" closes, and "Memoirs" and "Sandstone" are where the band's ensemble playing is clearest — listen to how the bass and keyboard trade responsibility for the harmony.

Go deeper

Shades (1986) and The Spin (1989) are the other essential albums, and Mint Jam is the live one.

Naná Vasconcelos deserves a proper investigation — his work with Egberto Gismonti and on the ECM label generally is some of the most beautiful music recorded anywhere. He died in 2016.

And Bob Mintzer leads his own big band, which is where his writing is most exposed.

Listening note: the Yellowjackets are a band in the old sense — four players negotiating in real time rather than a leader with accompanists. Follow the bass through these arrangements and you can hear the conversation happening, which is the pleasure this music actually offers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more