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Jeff " Tain " Watts
BAR TALK
(COLUMBIA)

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In all of jazz’s hyper-sophistication, what’s most often missing are good hooks — be it a lush melody or a recurring rhythmic fillip. Drummer Watts — Branford Marsalis’s rhythm heartbeat for most of their careers — has more than enough to get by. "JC Is the Man" builds off a little spoken barroom refrain — it’s not much, just a seven-bar nyah-nyah of a tune, with a groove-section bridge of cross-talk. But Watts deploys tenor-sax Ravi Coltrane, guitarist Paul Bollenback, harmonica player Gregoire Maret, and pianist David Budway in a series of rapidly twining counterlines of the melody, with Bollenback laying down soft, fat chords on the bridge. It’s so good that it gets a deserved — slightly more impressionistic and funky — reprise later in the album.

The quartet track "Vodville" is equally hummable, but with constant tempo and meter changes built into the tune, so that the band — with Marsalis on tenor — sound fresh on every chorus. You could almost call "Mr. JJ" an old-fashioned blowin’-session cutting contest, with Marsalis and Michael Brecker taking turns with tenor solos, but the tune sets a template that seems to fire everyone up — odd phrase lengths, moves inside and outside the chords, and beautifully controlled "free" passages. On other tracks, Coltrane’s dry, understated intensity and tricky lines are a tonic. Even the more obvious pop moves like "Side B" (with jazz/funk guitarist Hiram Bullock and some synth sweetener) are difficult for the moldiest jazz nerd to resist.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: August 29 - September 5, 2002
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