Featuring sweet, grand dame songstress, Dee Alexander
Luscious, pin-drop music. Every word, consonant, and vowel, lovingly, fully endowed. A casual, slip-and-slide coming together, spontaneous combustion before the big bang. Big bang, big band crackle-popping in a sync-groove, slightly off-set toward the sweetly harmonic dissonance of something this way comes…jazz at its most populace-pleasing.
Chicago Soul Jazz Collective is here, picking up the melancholy of nostalgia, fervor, and favor. The horn-heavy band weaves its way through jazz and funk, soul and gospel, with the ease of legends.
Featuring Chicago legend Dee Alexander, who gives soulful vision and voice to the sweetest songs, connecting everyone listening to the music…not just the hardcore musicians listening for the hard-bop-backed turns and finicky slides, nodding appreciatively at chord changes and tonal values.
The six-piece big band plus-two (Victor Garcia — percussion, Dan Leali — tambourine, track one) sounds multiplied 100-fold, as if meant for a very large theater in the middle of every-town on the verge of Armageddon-excess.
Their third album, On the Way to Be Free (May 13, 2022, JMarq Records), features nine original tracks, eight of them written by tenor saxophonist John Fournier, seven vocals, two instrumentals…swinging, grooving for the lyrical, musical fences.
Guitarist/vocalist Larry Brown Jr. penned the sexy, seductive, crazy-right “Crazy Wrong” bedroom ballad.
“Soapbox preachers shouting at the rain
Chase the voodoo down and break the chain
You keep saying everybody’s free
I’ve been here since 1963
Go ahead and turn your back on me
Go ahead and raise your fist to me
The man keeps saying everybody’s free
I’ve been here since 1963”
The tracks go from wanting to be all about love to something else, something foreboding, prophetic, and final…sweet, soulful music versus getting ready for a battle of the soul. The undercurrent, the antidote found in every good song worth its hits, love will always find a bridge. Perhaps on a stirring, airy trumpet line taking the rhythm section home (“Carry Me”) after a hard day’s night.
“But in between sad and sour, I promise to try and bring you sweet things”
“Mama Are We There Yet?” collapses on horns and a choir straight out of the 1960s musical, “Hair,” with a little “Jesus Christ Superstar” thrown in…as the brass section takes a funky downward, jigsaw turn. “I’ve been here since 1963…”
“On the Way to Be Free” hop-skips and jumps on a lively, melodic, bluesy track about shedding your skin and your shackles, and heading for the Promised Land, to sounds of true individual/collective liberation. The subject matter is much too serious to be treated so seriously, music and lyrics imbuing the end goal of freedom with the lift and lightness of authentic being, rather than a fist-clenching, fist-waving dirge. Vocals dropping in all the right places, drive home the point-by-point architecture of form and function “on the way…to be free…”
“Sometimes the future terrifies me
I hide my mind in the past
When the mighty storms come to capsize me
I tie myself to the mast
That’s living to me
And I feel so alive”
“So Alive” hyper-focuses on vocalist Dee Alexander’s best attributes, the strength in the vulnerability, the tang and hang, and clash of deep emotions, restrained, laden with natural lyrical warmth, where a break, a whisper, scratch and screech are done with intuitive purpose.
Bonus: trumpeter Carroll mirrors Alexander’s sweet surrender, note for note.
“The Man is Coming Back” is the part where shit gets real and the fight for freedom gets tested, with fierce, warning-salvo vocals and horns that insistently rise, despite the coming of the storm, the antiquity of the antagonist who just cannot let it be — and the hero in pauper’s clothing, striking back with terrible blows.
An impossible musical in a time of war. Shakespearean “Footloose,” but for keeps.
“Get your Bible
Get your gun
Get your sister
The pretty one
Meet us down by the railroad tracks
Bring a nickel
‘Cause the man’s coming back”
There’s a sense of a loosely unburdening musical — spilled milk absurdist theater — about history, the human condition, socio-ethno-political injustices in the name of Manifest Destiny. The ties that bind, enslaved or free.
Larry Brown Jr.’s “Crazy Wrong” speaks to taboo love, one-on-one and societally as a whole, wrapped up in a pop song, ready for the radio, circa 1960s-present. Bass and horns build up into this intimate vocal embrace, pushing and pulling, tearing lovers apart; a musical chemical reaction in an internal monologue shorthand.
“Bodies shaking, earth is quaking, rain is pouring, fire’s blazing…”
The trumpeter does what trumpeters do, make a whole (enraptured) mess of the spaces in between the waiting and the yearning, the courage of that first, forbidden impulse.
The Collective saves the best — scatting and harmonizing — for last.
“Carry Me”: simple, anthemic, escapist, lit up on a percussive and brass-painted, horse-drawn rhythm. Alexander’s deep-throated vocals wash over like fine cabernet on a cold night.
“Deep in the Delta by the riverside
A calm place where my spirit hides
When it’s all too much to bare
Your love finds me there”
“Behind the Crusaders”: The horns aren’t quite together, but they get there in time, in this instrumental, deepening the groove in scurrying measures. John Fournier takes centerstage, vocalizing his own ne’er-do-well on the shapely, musculature of tenor on sax, as Brown conceptualizes the essence of fine jazz-blues soul with his flickering bonfire guitar, grazing incense-worship.
“Sweet Things” is that one song too many, better left for the B side. Alexander, however, is as pitch-perfect as ever, finding meaning in sing-song, rhyme-y-rhyme-y, sometimes clunky lyrics (that don’t fit the music), so you get the gist of love’s unlimited. Maybe if she scat-hummed her way through…
“All I can offer is a hand to hold
My romantic gestures are simple and few
There will always be sad things to color you blue”
On the other hand, “Nothing Good Ever Goes Away” is as good as it gets. Fournier’s instrumental spectacular, with vocal encouragement, does the job of a show-stopping finale, all hands on deck, every hand in dynamic sync.
The revved-up encore of a tune gives the horn players room to spin magical tales, and the rhythm section their own space to fly. Fahmy’s keys (he plays Rhodes, organ, and clavinet) sing their own special song, while cymbals crash and guitar flashes.
Every famous R&B soul-funk horn band in existence is taken into consideration in this wild roundabout.
As it should be.
Chicago Soul Jazz Collective: co-leaders tenor saxophonist John Fournier and trumpeter Marques Carroll, keyboardist Amr Fahmy, bassist Andrew Vogt, guitarist/vocalist Larry Brown Jr., and drummer Keith Brooks II.