Joe Chambers - New World

Porter

In a business where top billing recording gigs aren’t usually elusive to deserving musicians, drummer Joe Chamber’s path to the driver’s seat was oddly fraught with delays and detours. He kept busy during the Sixties with sideman dates, mainly in the employ of Bobby Hutcherson. Hutch’s Components could rightly be claimed as a joint venture given that Chambers’ compositions occupy the entire B-side of the record. Still, no offer circulated down from the Lion and Wolff front office and Chambers had to wait until 1998 to ink a deal with Blue Note. Fortunately, other labels were listening and responsive, among them the presciently-titled Finite Records which financed this date in the middle of the following decade.

The project is very much of its time and shares common ground with another of Chambers’ loosely contemporaneous efforts, The Almoravid. Eastern, Latin and African elements combine in a populist leaning bent that also plies a predictable emphasis on percussion and sacrifices some of the compositional complexity of the drummer’s earlier work. Omar Clay and Ray Mantilla each employ their own batteries of drums alongside Chambers’ core kit and marimba. Vamps and riffs serve as the primary structural adhesives on the album’s five pieces. The title track sounds like a kissing cousin to the Charlie’s Angels theme, heavy on funky atmospherics that arise from fuzz bass and guitar and an answering amalgam of keening soprano saxophone and electric piano. Chambers and his percussive partners percolate around and beneath, building a vacillating array of beats with hands and sticks.

Clay’s “Chung Dynasty” works off a spiraling progression advanced by vibes and guitar. Dick Meza’s flute and flotilla of bells and shakers supplies added color and texture to create a mystic-minded mood piece. “Rio” and “Blow-Up” are borrowings from Chambers’ Blue Note colleagues Shorter and Hancock respectively, smoothed out and almost loungified through plush electric arrangements. Meza’s tenor competes with Paul Metzke’s guitar for the prize of most sugary solo on the first while Herb Bushler’s bass bubbles away as the anchor of an undulating groove on the second. Meza’s tenor sprouts some welcome spines, riding Chambers’ sturdy backbeat. Metzke sets off his own series of miniature flameouts on the Billy Cobham-worthy closer “Rock Pile”. Though the program length clocks at an EP-sized thirty-odd minutes, the brevity actually works in the album’s favor. Initial spins may leave a pungent impression of patchouli and Thai stick, but Chambers’ stylish and strenuous sticking keeps the disc from tipping totally into full fusion fission.

~ Derek Taylor