Christian Sands spent some time in his not so misspent youth listening to The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest. Your writer does not feel sufficiently qualified to indicate whether such bands peep through by way of influence on this auspicious new album from the Sands man. We don’t think The Roots do waterfalls, nor indeed do they chase them, but our subject does a kind of waterfall of piano notes on Song of the Rainbow People. "This is a song about bringing people together in the midst of all the racial and religious tension, hate and misunderstanding in the world today, " declares Sands.
The track, all 6.20 minutes of it, builds from a sparse start into something that drenches the listener all over with ecstatic sound and righteous, soaring arpeggios. Towards the conclusion he leads his band back down towards quiet, finishing on a soft crescendo. It’s quite something to witness the musical astuteness of it all, the sense of deft control. However, the album actually opens with Armando’s Song, a blithely energetic piece featuring swift, fluid runs along the piano keys. It’s buoyant and blissed-out, like mid-career Chick Corea.
Yasushi Nakamura plays nifty bass throughout, while Christian McBride does a charming woody bass solo on Bud’s Tune. Marcus Strickland almost sings his tenor sax run on Pointing West, before handing over to Sands in delightful call-and-response inter-play.
Freefall has charming synthy, percussive noises in the background - it’s spectral or astral, with a touch of ruminative, solemn Weather Report about it as Strickland employs bass clarinet as well as his tenor. There is a salsa touch to ¡Óyeme! as Cristian Rivera pummels away at percussion. Once again one is reminded of Weather Report and the unit's great Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira. Guitarist Gilad Hekelsman comes in on Reaching for the Sun and we get a kind of fusion/Pat Metheny-stye thing going on.
A bluesy, strutty reading of Bill Withers' Use Me takes the ensemble down the esoteric jazz fusion route while Gangstalude does much the same thing. (Me, I'm a bit of a tenor sax fiend so I began to miss it around here.)
The album concludes with the, oh well, schmaltzy Somewhere Out There and thus the album turns and displays itself, resplendent with the myriad colours of jazz.
Paddy Kehoe
