Eddie Fisher: "Eddie Fisher & The Next One Hundred Years"

Not recorded in Chicago…instead stirred up and conjured in Archway Studios in St. Louis, with production help from “main man” Oliver Sain.  The groove is raw, lowdown, ominous…it’s what Grant Green might sound like as filtered through wah wah pedals, distortion, and backed up by The Counts, circa their Westbound tenure.  Guitarist Eddie Fisher had done an earlier album for Cadet called “The Third Cup,” a tribute to bandleader Leo Gooden that, while demonstrating some of his capacity for fringe experimentalism, suggested little of this gritty, small-band masterpiece.  Key tracks are the fuzzed-out “Either Or,” the Meters-meets-swing-fusion of “Another Episode,” and the long, drifting, movement-oriented “Beautiful Things,” which features an unnamed violin player taking Fisher and his group into a distant, hazy psychedelia that slowly morphs into a stomping funk throw-down.  The set closes with “East St. Louis Blues,” blues maybe but more accurately described as swampy funk.  This is the kind of session where you can practically smell the smoke in the studio, hear the conversation in between takes, imagine yourself there and as one of the players.  An intimate, late-night record that immerses the listener completely in its energy.