Kenny Barron: "Lucifer"

This is for the keyboard heads, no question ‘bout that.  While Barron’s “Sunset To Dawn” album, mentioned earlier in the blog, keeps its jazz roots firm and only occasionally drifts into fusion, “Lucifer” is practically bathed in tasteful, experimental electronics and grooves, a completely different experience that any of Barron’s music before or since.  “Spirits” opens the LP, with Barron setting the tempo on clavinet, building until Billy Hart’s foot-heavy, ridiculously funky drumming thunders in.  The horn section, comprised of New York underground notables like Charles Sullivan, James Spaulding and Bill Barron (Kenny’s older, sax-playing brother), chimes in with gnarled post-bop modalities that sporadically burst into completely free freak-outs.  The brass crafts a combustible melody line that gives the tune body, and then makes way for the guitar solos of Carlos Alomar, who, while probably most famous for being one of David Bowie’s sidemen, gets into some very jazzy, post-bop shredding here.  This is a funk song, absolutely, but it contains other elements that render such a description irrelevant.  “Spirits” eventually melts into “Firefly,” a breezy bossa/samba that contrasts its predecessor quite unusually, and yet the level of playing and soloing is such that there is no break in the action, even if the ferocity has mellowed somewhat.  Side 1 concludes with a contemplative duet between Barron on acoustic piano and reedman Spaulding on flute, giving the listener a chance to breathe before flipping the script to check out the goodies still waiting in the wings.

Side 2 begins with “Hellbound,” a moog- and synth-driven piece that finds its flexibility in its peaks and valleys, encompassing heaviness one moment and delicacy the next.  The title track follows the relative calm of “Hellbound” with a sound so vicious it may as well be punk-rock, except that in this vision of “Lucifer” the band approximates the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever battling for supremacy with the multi-tiered layers of Dante’s Inferno as their backdrop, even as the ghosts of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane look on.  “Lucifer” collides into itself by its inevitable fade, and then, strangely, Barron finishes everything off with a solo piano rendition of the Sonny Rollins standard “Oleo,” which sounds downright ebullient compared to the mélange that preceded it.  Still, Kenny Barron obviously was trying to prove something on this album, which he discusses at length in the liner notes; that is, acoustic and electric instrumentation do not have to be islands unto themselves in the world of jazz, and indeed, if you can gather the right mix of players and concepts in the same room, you may even achieve revolutionary results by engaging in so-called musical fusion.  That is, in the end, the feat accomplished by the “Lucifer” LP, and nowhere else in the world of music will you find an album so compelling and adventurous.