Vintage fusion lives – with a 90s sheen and a 21st-century twist – courtesy of Chicago bass guitarist Frank Russell. On his new album Circle Without End (Sonic Portraits), he’s funneled an all-star cast of modern Chi-town stars, along with some top-notch ringers, into arrangements as crisp and bracing as a stiff wind off Lake Michigan.
The album gets a full-tilt debut treatment in a CD-release show Sunday night (tomorrow) from 7 till 10 at Martyrs (3855 N. Lincoln).
Russell is a journeyman and a veteran of the Chicago jazz and jobbing scenes; he’s played everything from power jazz-funk to show bands and weddings. But his heart clearly lies with the electric jazz that Miles Davis purveyed for the last two decades of his life, and he has filled the album (the second under his leadership) with energetic homages to that music – even to the point of including several of Davis’s former sidemen on the disc.
These include Chicago keyboardist Robert Irving III – Davis’s musical director during the 1980s – bassists Darryl Jones and Richard Patterson, who both played with Davis during that time, and in a different category, trumpeter Wallace Roney. (Roney actually did share the stage with Miles on occasion, most notably at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival, and despite his own projects he remains the go-to guy for re-creations of Davis’s style in most of its historic iterations.)
Besides them, the guest list reads like a union listing of the city’s top funk and fusion players – such as keyboardists Vijay Tellis-Nayak, Greg Spero, and Mike Logan, along with trumpeter Corey Wilkes and guitarist Buddy Fambro – and also several straight-ahead stars in guitarist Henry Johnson, saxist Tim McNamara, and percussionists Charles Heath and Dede Sampaio. With a supporting cast like that, it’s small wonder that the album boasts such high production values.
This crisp professionalism makes a lightning bolt of the opening track, “Code MD-2,” Robert Irving’s updated sequel to a tune he wrote for Davis in the mid-80s. Drummer Kahari Parker teams with Russell to etch the rhythm underneath a melody played in unison by keys, trumpet, and Fambro’s taut guitar.
Elsewhere, the intricate, note-heavy line of “Quick Pix” reaches back to fusion-era compositions by Chick Corea and Michal Urbaniak, while the presence of the Davis alumni bassists Jones and Patterson gives Russell's lead lines a thick, three-dimensional texture. It recalls the impact that Marcus Miller, playing both electric bass and bass clarinet, had on Davis’s band in particular (and late fusion) in general. Songs written specifically for this album by Jones and guitarist Johnson offer another angle; so does “Ladysmith,” Russell’s tribute to South African band Ladysmith Black Mambazo, with whom he has worked.
The contributions of his collaborators should in no way downplay Russell’s role in orchestrating this project. In addition to carving explosive solos on his various instruments – he plays standard bass guitar, 5-string bass, and fretless electric throughout the disc – Russell either wrote or shares composer credit on the majority of the tunes. This gives the album a definite cohesion; but his co-writers include enough different musicians – and different enough musicians – to have created a neatly eclectic collection of tunes.
Russell’s personal history takes him from the first flower of fusion – when Miles was blowing the doors off the jazz mainstream with such albums as Bitches Brew and later Decoy – into the “contemporary” jazz genre, which eventually devolved into the dreaded “smooth jazz.” An element of that finds its way onto the new album, in one or two of the instrumentals and a couple of vocal tracks.
As you might guess from my characterization thus far, I can easily do without this side of electric jazz. Nonetheless, it belongs by right to the continuum of music Russell presents so well here. And true to form, these tracks have a sleek panache that should make even skeptics at least take note.
The rest of this album magnetizes the music and galvanizes the listener (or at least this listener). Circle Without End shimmers with the kinetic energy that fusion unleashed the first time around. For new listeners, that’s an ear-grabber; for those of us who heard it when it was new, Circle Without End brings back fond memories, and enhances them with the strength of these modern musicians’ commitment.
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