Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival (Verve)

Fusion had the commercial edge in 72’. Roy Ayers’ set from the Montreux Jazz Fest of that year suggests solid evidence as to why it held supremacy. Originally circulated in heavily edited form, the album features Ayers’ quartet Ubiquity just two years old and at a stage nascent to the massive popularity that would greet them in the coming years. The cover shot conveys the most obvious bon mot, depicting as it does Ayers peeking out from inside an upright bamboo coffin with a handful of mallets outstretched, looking like Marley’s Mr. Brown (controlled by remote?). The Verve/Polygram reissue adds four unissued tunes and nearly an additional thirty minutes. Ayers’ ensemble is economical in instrumentation if at times a bit too prolix in deployment. Pianist Harry Whitaker’s preference for electric over acoustic keys and Clint Houston’s turgid amplified bass strings give the music a healthy dose of funk-inflected juice. The fizzy “Daddy Bug,” ripe with rapid fire note chains, vivid splashes of tonal color and a corpulent unison line voiced by Ayers mallets and Houston’s plucking digits, arrives after a preface peppered with percussive gongs and boom-bams. Whittaker regularly apes the more luminescent tonalities of the leader’s vibes in an effulgent cascade that works well with Lee’s hyperactive traps. On a garrulous rundown of Miles’ “In a Silent Way” he flips a switch and prickly guitar distortion suddenly impregnates his swirling clusters of chords. Houston peels off a percolating ostinato against the steady clip-clop of Lee’s cymbals and cowbell. “Move to Groove” draws on the simple directive of its title and is the most overtly funky of the concert’s tracks with a break beat that all but begs to be sampled. There are misses too, such as the Whittaker-penned “Thoughts,” which winds up sounding quite empty-headed with all its muzzy introspective noodling. Randy Newman’s “He Gives Us All His Love,” revamped as a sparkly slow-grooving ballad and a funkified double-time reading of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” might be pop-pandering choices, but Ayers makes them work in a loungy incense and peppermints sort of way. It’s an album optimal for lazy summer afternoons when heady humidity creeps at the corners of your consciousness and respite comes in the form of a several ice cold beers in quick succession.