LAFAYETTE GILCHRIST
Towards the Shining Path
Hyena
Read
the Jazzitude review of Lafayette Gilchrist/The Music
According To
Review the Jazzitude review
of Lafayette Gilchrist/3
Towards the Shining Path is a huge
step forward for Lafayette Gilchrist, and indeed it is not
too soon to say that we are in the presence of a monster
jazz talent here, one that is as original as his influences—Monk,
Ellington, David Murray, Mingus, and, yes, also deep old
school hip-hop grooves. But man, Gilchrist, arranging for
a septet, comes across as a massive composer and arranger
here. The additional voices give his pieces perspective
that increases the listeners’ ability to connect with
his music.
Gilchrist does recall Monk in many ways. For
one thing he has a fully formed but truly unique pianistic
vocabulary. There’s both primitive power and a kind
of elegance in Gilchrist’s piano work, and like a
few other young pianists, he likes to use the full range
of the piano, particularly on the bottom end. Gilchrist’s
work seems like the ultimate conclusion of the music of
Monk, as well as the kind of confluence of black urban music
styles championed by producer David Axelrod. “No Locomotion
Blues” pushes into the kind of dirty groove one can
imagine hearing in a gritty, but really hip, strip club.
Over that Gilchrist layers a real barrelhouse piano solo
that explodes into a New Orleans grinding funk as Gilchrist’s
filigree piano work fills in the cracks. Goddamn, this is
good music. He can play pretty, too, as on the introduction
and opening sections of “Thorn Bush.” In fact,
this ballad is a real standout on the disc, featuring beautiful
trumpet work by Mike Cerri.
“The music that means something—and
I don’t care what style of music it is—is music
that comes out of personalities,” said Gilchrist in
an interview last year in the Baltimore City Paper.
And that is what he lays on us, music that undoubtedly comes
from his specific filtering of his musical environment and
his investigation of historic Afro-American musical styles.
It’s music that is big as life, and it takes balls
to produce that kind of music and stay on, well, the shining
path.
Some of the credit for the powerhouse crunch
of Gilchrist’s music has to go to his rhythm section,
comprised of bassist Anthony “Blue” Jenkins
and Nate Reynolds. Jenkins is new with Gilchrist on this
CD. His playing is distinctive and straddles the territory
between soul, funk, jazz, and R&B like no bassist in
a jazz setting since the rock-solid grooves of Michael Henderson.
Reynolds’ drum work is an amalgam of the strength
and power of Elvin Jones, the sheer delight in energy of
Tony Williams, and the incredible diversity of Jack DeJohnette.
His work on the title track is a burst of raw vigor that
propels Gilchrist and the horn section forward.
“I try to meld the extremes into one,”
says Gilchrist. “The worlds that seem not to belong
together, the worlds that run parallel to each other, begin
to collide.” On Towards the Shining Path,
Gilchrist does allow these parallel musical universes to
collide, and the collision points produce some remarkable,
memorable music.
