Greg Howe, Victor Wooten, Dennis Chambers
Extraction

Ladies and Gentlemen: fasten your seatbelts, straighten your seats, and don't worry about the emergency exits. Pilot Greg Howe and his assistants Victor Wooten and Dennis Chambers welcome you on the flight that will take you straight to another planet!

This record is proof of what human limbs (?) can do on strings, keys, and skins. All right, you might say it's too technical an album, "muscular," full of notes that sometimes might seem unnecessary. Okay, but try for a moment to set these perfectly legitimate considerations aside and let yourself be amazed. Right from the first notes of the title-track, a Chambers solo that seems to play five drums simultaneously and a theme with surprising rhythmic accents. Never predictable, oblique, and cerebral. Then a gallop of notes at a crazy speed: Howe, being the metalhead he is, uses the sweeping technique to play scales most of his colleagues are unaware of (excuse the controversy, but it's the harsh reality!).

The album continues on funky rhythms that would make even a mannequin shake. The cohesion among the musicians is surprising, each instrument reaches absolute peaks of virtuosity, while the tension builds up into a sonic orgy that I've rarely had the pleasure of listening to. If the fireworks of the first tracks weren't enough, Greg pulls an acoustic guitar out of his hat. Listen in "Contigo" to how our supergroup manages to put its technical prowess into the service of an expressive composition with a Spanish flavor (there's also a piano solo by Dave Cook, who isn't featured in the album's title but certainly proves to be up to the task).
After the guitar interlude of "A Delicacy", we continue with "Lucky 7", another track for which I'll need a good drummer to explain the meter to me (from the title, I'd say 7/4 but, honestly, I can't keep up...). In short, every track surprises with the skill of these masters of their respective instruments and the balance achieved in the arrangements (which is no small feat when dealing with such artistic personalities).

Duke Ellington said: "There are only two types of music: good and bad". I would add: "There are only two types of musicians: those who can play and those who can't." Today there's too much bad music made by good musicians (what a waste!) and too many people who claim to be musicians without reason.

Every now and then, it doesn't hurt to remember what it means to know how to play an instrument...