Lazy-ass bassist/producer Bill Laswell has yet a new project, Shine. It features outrageous guitarist/Praxis bandmate Buckethead and Shin Terai, a sound collagist who’s recorded as Chaos Face for Laswell’s old Subharmonic imprint. (Guitarist Nicky Skopelitis and keyboardist Bernie Worrell and programmer Robert Musso also contribute.) Shine’s debut album, Heaven and Hell (Innerhythmic), treads familiar postmodern dub ground that Laswell knows like the fretboard of his four-string. His supple, fathoms-deep bass lines irrigate earth and colons with equal efficacy. Stodgy 4/4 beats are accented with slick, agile rimshots while Buckethead generates spacey feedback bleeps and liquid Jerry Garcia-meets-John McLaughlin-in-a-contemplative-mood guitar lines. Heaven and Hell largely resides in the former figurative space, with Buckethead’s flanged guitar, Laswell’s triumphant bass figures and Musso’s propulsive rhythms evoking a spiritual majesty that guides the mind to higher planes of existence. Though Buckethead’s fluttery, grandiose reverberations on “Movement 6” echo the Edge’s with U2, Heaven and Hell mostly succeeds in keeping dub much closer to Paradise than to Hades.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
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
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro