Filled with deep, dark bass work and contagious rhythms, Oteil & the Peacemakers’ Love of a Lifetime (Nile 66:29) offers a funky fusion stew of intricately arranged, yet melodically accessible compositions. Led by bassist/guitarist Oteil Burbridge, the band displays amazing musicianship in a variety of tricky settings-from the slowburning, majestic gospel piece “Church” (featuring bass notes to rattle your chest cavity) to the gurgling, popping funk of “Butter Biscuit,” with carnival pipe keyboards lending a James Brown-in-outer-space feel. There’s a juxtaposition of modern and traditional sounds threaded throughout pieces like “Listen Bart” with acoustic nylon-sounding guitar plucks giving way to a contemporary high-stepping rhythm. The effect can be viscerally evocative as well as toe-tapping. The series of breaks and changes running through “Ankh,” for example, feels like stepping deeper and deeper into a passage. Likewise “Hymn to the Nile” offers beauty in darkness as gentle melodic snapshots of acoustic guitar and vocal pop in over a steady bass drone.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading

Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time