Guitarist Willie Oteri doesn’t resort to Greg Howe’s flash but he does evoke the feel of the early jazz-rock sessions by the likes of Miles Davis and Tony Williams Lifetime on Sprial Out (DIW). Ephraim Owens has the Miles role and effectively fixes the musical landscape circa 1971. Initially Oteri offers a more languid approach that creates mood, something rather lacking among this column’s selection of CDs, with their in-yer-face anxiety to please. In many ways this album gets closer to the spirit of Miles Davis than the album by Children on the Corner, and like so many of the albums here suggest we are not so much in a brave new world, but the old one, only better understood.
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