Song of the Sun - Jim Beard

Mar

31

Song of the Sun - Jim Beard

≡ Category: 1990s, Essential, Fusion, Music Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

Jim Beard’s Song of the Sun, his first date as a leader, is an impossibly assured debut, the work of a mature artist. There is the none of the grandstanding you would expect from a young virtuostic pianist.

Instead, what you get is laser sharp focus, a manifesto, the painstaking layering of compositional and stylistic brickwork that reveals a unique artistic mind.

Beard is aided immeasurably by the presence of three of the greatest soloists the jazz world had to offer in 1990: Michael Brecker on tenor sax, Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, and Toots Thielmans on harmonica. (No doubt, Beard was inspired by Jaco Pastorius’ use of these same musicians on his landmark release Word of Mouth.)

How to describe the music? Well, there is very little blues in it, that’s for sure. There are some pop elements. The melodies are deceptively simple, disguising the sophisticated harmonic structures beneath. The music is almost post-jazz, in that it seems intended to bring jazz back into the pop mainstream, not by compromising the integrity of the music, the way Kenny G and his ilk do, but by making it accessible, the way big band music was accessible to the masses before the advent of bebop made jazz the province of hipsters.

Sadly, we live in a world in which people make snap judgements based on the most shallow criteria possible. Beard’s refusal to uglify his music, include incongruous virtuoistic displays, or give the listeners other cues to signal the “seriousness” of his work allowed critics to dismiss Song of the Sun as fuzak.

Don’t you make that mistake.