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CD Feature/ Branford Marsalis: "Metamorphosen"

  Tobias

Depending on your level of exploration in the jazz world, sax-player Branford is the second most popular Marsalis brother after Wynton. A studious, serious slab, Metamorphosen was minted to commemorate this quartet's being a solid unit for 10 years straight without a single change in personnel, an anomaly of the genre that's about as likely as your local Red Lobster having the same busboy for a decade.

The recording is round and beautifully speaker-panned, sounding as though it was recorded in a high school gym by brainiacs from NASA, and from this foundation springs some instant-classic stuff, nothing at all like the chintzy Dave Sanborn piffle I somehow expected, being that I'm far from familiar with these cats. Newbies need to know that Branford was a major cog in the Spike Lee movies Do the Right Thing and School Daze (in which he played the role of Jordam), so any familiarity with those meandering soundtracks is good prep.

Straight-on barnburner "The Return of the Jitney Man" tears the album open nicely, and later, a flurry of surgically precise 16th notes makes the opening of "Jabberwocky" a trip even the craziest jazz fan (okay, Mingus spastics excepted) would want to take to the end. "Abe Vigoda" is a slowbie that walks a Weather Report highwire.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Branford Marsalis / Marsalis Music