When first issued in 1989 on the Virgin label Venture (as CDVE 27), this groundbreaking album made a medium-sized splash before sinking without trace, perhaps through insufficient promotion and rapid deletion. What a pleasant surprise then to find it reappearing, repackaged and with an extra track, through the discerning people at ACT. The additional track, a ballad duet by Julian Arguelles and Django Bates, is hardly a big-band track and adds little to the set, which triumphs via other concepts.
The genesis of the record was the enthusiasm of producer John L Walters for Mike Gibbs’s work, and its realisation comes through Gibbs’s fluent scoring, the gloriously gangling rhythm tracks of Moses, Martin and Wittman, Walters’s vibrant production and the efforts of the excellent soloists, in particular John Scofield, then on a powerful post-Miles roll. Scofield has superb showings on the sinewy funk charts Watershed and Adult, at this time still pursuing the muscular, harmonically rich style he soon abandoned in favour of a mixture of abstraction and basic blues values.
With one or two exceptions, this is Gibbs bending his skills to populist beats – funk, reggae, gospel and the like – and he makes a fine job of it, pushing forward the boundaries of fusion a couple more notches. The music has dated hardly at all; indeed the main mark of the passing years is the maturation of the original title’s ‘Mike’ into the more patrician ‘Michael’. If you didn’t get the record last time, make haste now – although since ACT take jazz seriously, it should be in catalogue for a good while yet.
Discography
(1) Wall To Wall; Pride Aside; Kosasa; Almost Ev’ry Day; (2) Waterfront; (V Watershed; Mopsus; Adult; Pride Outside (45.10)
(1) Dave Tofani (f, af, picc); Bob Mintzer (f, ts, bcl); Chris Hunter (f, ss, as, ts); Lou Marini (f, ss, ts); Jim Odgren (as); Lew Soloff, Allan Rubin, Earl Gardner, Ian Carr (t); John Clark (frh); Dave Bargeron (tb); David Taylor (btb); Mike Gibbs (tb, p); Bob (Rahboat Ntumba) Moses (d, dprog); Bad Bill Martin (dprog); Ben ‘Been Jamming’ Wittman (pc, dprog); Brad Hatfield, Dave Bristow (kyb); John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Kevin Eubanks, Dave Fiuczynski, Duke Levine (elg); Kai Eckhardt (elb). Boston, New York & London, summer 1988.
(2) Julian Arguelles (ss); Django Bates (p). London, September 1990.
(ACT 9231-2)
