Medeski, Martin and Wood - Notes From The Underground
This is the first Medeski, Martin and Wood CD which was recorded in 1992. One of the interesting things about this CD is that it is completely acoustic, compared to their usual electric funk and jazz with heavy synthesizers and sound effects, this is completely acoustic. Alot of the songs are very loosely structured and are full of abstract improv's. Some songs seem to go off on great tangents with the musicians banging away randomly on their instruments with little sense of direction, but after building up to a climax, the melody always seems to reappear and bring the band back together to finish off a great song. If your a Medeski fan, this is a great CD to listen to, to see where they have come from. I could have done without most of the abstract sections, but as always MMW is always able to hold a groove and jam till no end, and Notes From The Underground is no exception.
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Ferky posted on 07/27/2007 @ 9:07:11 pm
I've had this album for a while - my band's drummer is a huge MMW fan. This album remains their strongest for me. This album proved to me that they weren't just a good funk band - they were a jazz band that felt their way into funk. Not only that, to top it off, their jazz wasn't inflected heavily by anyone in particular. This wasn't a Davis knockoff, not a Monk knockoff, not a Bad Plus knockoff - this was, much like the Necks, a band I just found, innovatively different. The highly atonal jam on Querencia and Hermeto's Daydream (by far the best track on the album) was what brought me in - not simply because of the tonal complexity, but the incessant groove it had on top. The abstractness is key here, something that really doesn't exist on anything else I've heard by them, and that very abstractness is what holds this album together.