Medeski Martin and Wood
Shack-Man

THE REVIEW

Judging from this little page, medeschio, martino e bosco I listened to them for the first time a year ago, casually and around the mirrored change of season; apart from a few rains, the air can still be quite torrid to sweat to the music of this super benevolent band, because with them, a bit of heat is a must.

Nineteen ninety-six, for the joy of production and because when funk settles in said decade, metaphorically something rises like the kick-snare-hi-hat of bubblehouse; we're talking about jazz where the effects are full of psychedelic derangement, yet everything sounds extremely tactile, the double bass seems to fray from one moment to another who knows where, and in the pseudo-improvisations, the jujube broth of the pedals always stirs the cards; anyway, similarly to friday afternoon in the universe there’s a shadow percussionist martin, medeski on mixed-assorted keyboards, wood ace of clubs and (this time) guitar.

Perhaps the roads to hell are paved with good intentions, in case these pearls sound to me like harmless jams with added zest; the melodies are clean yet dirty, scholastic yet ungraceful, revolve around agile jams with a limping step (think), full of overlapping rhythms (strance of the spirit regator), nighttime brackets (dracula) and guitars left to marinate in long, slow solos (spy kiss)

If I projected a dance, I would see a dance flowing in Brownian motion over a screen and that, like the music, wanders deceptively over the unforeseen that a four-four can have; saying it and then thinking about it, I find points of contact with the no less worthy strumming of both the heliocentrics and the whitefield brothers, for what I can imagine the latter squeezed a bit of medeski&co like an orange over a pyramid, giving a relatively classic jazz-funk at times even more experimental deviations.

Even if not a little hallucinatory, shack-man is an album of down-to-earth tracks, tribal and colorful like on the cover, with a pronounced bass and where with mixed assortment I also meant clavinet, synthesizer, percussion, keyboards, toy keyboards.