Vital Tech Tones’ VTT2 (Tone Center TC40082; 56:33) is pure, shameless, high-volume fun. With Scott Henderson and Victor Wooten (Vital Information, Tribal Tech, the Flecktones-get it?) joining the trio party, it’s like listening to your old college physics professors over dinner: plenty of big words, rarefied speech patterns and precious little you can fully digest without a scorecard (or a textbook). Smith tones down his bop side, Henderson does the same with his blues-rock side and Wooten’s jaw-dropping lead-bass keeps everyone on their toes (check “Catch Me if You Can”). And while it doesn’t swing as supplely as Vital Information, or the Hamm/Smith/Gambale trio, the high-energy gymnastics never degenerate into meaningless flash-at least not completely.
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