01 Indigo Montoya's Great Escape (John Funkhouser) 7:01 02 House of the Rising Sun (Traditional) 6:13 03 The Deep (John Funkhouser) 10:15 04 My Romance (Lorenz Hart) 10:19 05 Little Rootie Tootie 7:40 06 Leda (John Funkhouser) 7:43 07 Shakedown (John Funkhouser) 7:24 08 Still (John Funkhouser) 9:22
John Funkhouser - Still Year: 2013
Style: Jazz
Label: Jazsyzygy Records
Musicians: John Funkhouser - piano; Greg Loughman - bass; Mike Connors - drums.
Special guests: Phil Sargent - guitar (3, 5; 8); Aubrey Johnson - voice.
CD Review: John Funkhouser is the type of musician with whom country and western legend Johnny Cash could identify in a 'downbeat.' He's 'been everywhere, man.' For sure, Funkhouser's music has crossed its share of deserts bare, and breathed a lot of mountain air, because Funkhouser has been listening and playing everywhere, from South Africa to New York. And his music sounds like everything from everywhere, so there must be potent poetic irony embedded in the title of Funkhouser's new (fourth) CD: Still. Irony aside, it helps to be armed with a few facts about Funkhouser before descending into his lair of ubiquitous music traditions.
Funkhouser is a classically trained pianist, and bassist. He is the featured string bass soloist with the New England Philharmonic Orchestra, and The MIT Wind Ensemble. When he is not teaching at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, he does gigs "in a bunch of different styles," including jazz (avant-garde, straight ahead, traditional New Orleans jazz), classical, hip hop, Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music, folk music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Africa, American popular music, including funk, rock, blues and bluegrass. His classical musical background is similarly eclectic, and puts at his disposal quite formidable artists' tools, which promote a sense of experimentation encompassing his music. This brew of comprehensive capabilities surges out of Funkhouser's piano in the form of an accessible, inclusive "jazz exotica."
Pianist John Funkhouser Funkhouser's composing style avers building, and releasing tension using repetition and force. The date's many moods, and projections into nameless space, are book-ended by two mind-expanding compositions. In the opening track (Indigo Montoya's Great Escape), he augments these effects with relentless, quick-fingered salvos that create dense suspense, and insistent angularity, to a point of dizzying, but controlled chaos which eventually develop into a rhythmic slug fest with drummer Mike Connors. But Funkhouser's coup de grace for psyche-gnawing creation of tension, and suspenseful release, explodes out of the final, title track (Still). First, he goes due East to reflect a lasting interest in Indian classical music with its haunting beauty, and spiritual intensity wafting from Phil Sargent's convincing cimmerian guitar ; then like a proverbial musical eagle, he flies straight West to play "with a Boston world-jazz group called Natraj, and my experience with them helped me see...the structure of Indian music in a jazz way" (Funkhouser). He completes this genre hopping cycle on a vigorous, buffeting, rhythmic downdraft from Connors antic drums, and lands like an exotic bird of prey; all tensions folded in, plus a few piano steps, before finally coming to rest.
Drummer Mike Connors Jazz gives life to Funkhouser's musical world, and energizes his music. His selection of Thelonious Monk's 1952 composition "Little Rootie Tootie" (written for his son Thelonious Jr.) employs the motif of a surging locomotive to add the element of power to the intel