Artist: Medeski Martin & Wood
Album: Uninvisible
Genre: Jazz-Funk, Avant-Garde Jazz
Label: Blue Note/Toshiba-EMI
Released: 2002
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Uninvisible (3:39)
- I Wanna Ride You (3:29)
- Your Name Is Snake Anthony (3:12)
- Pappy Check (2:46)
- Take Me Nowhere (4:08)
- Retirement Song (4:47)
- Ten Dollar High (3:43)
- Where Have You Been? (3:37)
- Reprise (0:36)
- Nocturnal Transmission (6:38)
- Smoke (2:48)
- First Time Long Time (2:53)
- The Edge of Night (3:53)
- Off the Table (4:26)
- Fox (live) (11:18)
DOWNLOAD FROM FILECAT.NET >>>
Uninvisible is further than ever from conventional jazz organ. While blues and funk influences are evident throughout the album, they float on a sea of shadows. Sound sources are obscure or exotic; on "Pappy Check" innovative scratching by turntablist DJ Olive creates an impression of African percussion more than club atmospherics. Even where the instrumentation is less ambiguous, the trio steers toward a filmic noir sensibility, with Medeski leading the way in unorthodox techniques. His pitch-bend solo on "Take Me Nowhere" suggests the creak of a rusty hinge, with Wood's acoustic bass providing the anchor for his abstractions. Wood is in fact often mixed higher than Medeski, to the effect of reducing the keyboard parts to a sideline role and the album in turn to an exercise in mood more than virtuosity -- an impression enhanced by a similarly eccentric shrinkage of the power guitar part on "The Edge of Night" to a barely audible background element. The rhythm is steady and stealthy, a slow-motion oscillation between live and looped tracks, most often with a hip-hop sensibility. More important, every musician on each cut plays with a belief that overplaying only subverts the goals of collective improvisation. If any one album can be said to pick up on the surreal funk explorations of latter-day Miles Davis, Uninvisible is it.
Review by Robert L. Doerschuk