Lee Jones - Swish
1. Swish
2. Majik
3. One Little Blue Note
4. Cookin' On Gas
5. Retrospective
6. Halfway House
7. Dorian Diversion
8. Out Of The Day
9. Swish (Jam Mix)
Lee Jones (guitar and keyboards), Pete Parkinson
(saxes and flute), Ben Thomas (trumpet), Alex
Steele (keyboards), Frazer Snell and Mark
Smith (electric bass), Zoltan Dekany (double
bass), Chris Dagley (drums)
rec. Planet Zog studios, Hertfordshire
Lee Jones was born in 1984
and has already picked up a Jazz FM "Best
New Instrumentalist of the Year" award.
I’m not sure if he’s still currently studying
for his Bmus. Jazz degree at the Birmingham
Conservatoire but this disc certainly sounds
like post-graduate work to me, however much
I may personally dislike the style.
And the style is fusion,
a meld of George Benson, Larry Carlton, maybe
some Pat Metheny as well. It’s effortlessly
fluent and malleable and establishes a firm
groove from the outset. Swish is the
title track and it returns, rather like the
Aria of the Goldberg Variations, at the end
of the disc but this time as a jam mix – a
device Bach unaccountably overlooked in his
immortal masterpiece. It opens with a funky
shake down with tightly muted trumpet (Ben
Thomas) and some take-off guitar work. In
Majik one finds some nicely lyric saxophone
from Pete Parkinson, equally fine piano from
Alex Steele and tight sectional work from
the rhythm section. One Little Blue Note
is the expected hard bop homage whereas we’re
pitched straight back into the funkier shores
of fusion with the next track, Cookin’
on Gas.
The shifting metres and colours
of the rhythm section are at their best in
something like Retrospective where
they support the appealing sax lines. Parkinson
also enlarges the range of colours of the
band with his flute work on Halfway House.
There’s a good, long guitar solo from the
leader on Dorian Diversion, an academic
sounding title for an otherwise over-long
tune. Lee Jones’s best playing is reserved
for Out of the Day, a delightful song
made more so by virtue of his articulate single
string and chordal work. It’s the kind of
playing in which he comes closest to the lyric
playing of, say, Martin Taylor.
Still, Lee Jones has clearly
found a niche early in his career and has
a powerfully strong technical basis on which
to expand. Too many of these cuts are too
alike, despite the variety of instrumentation
and rhythm that Jones has introduced. But
the disc as a whole is, I’m sure, a harbinger
of even better things to come.
Jonathan Woolf
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