Lounge to this generous slice of catchy soul jazz and Afro-Latin flavours, fellow toe tappers. It is new to unstiffen a limb to from American keyboardist and composer Zaccai Curtis.
The great Craig Handy – who is on the excellent new Anna Pauline album Lucky To Be Me reviewed above – features on tenor saxophone and flute. He’s quite brilliant on Sonoluminescence. The album title word is a scientific term meaning the emission of light from tiny bubbles in a liquid when they are rapidly compressed by sound waves. So now you know! Joe Dyson plays drums. Brevan Hampden adds congas and percussion. His touch on the title track makes you press repeat over and over again.
Bass duties are split across the eight-track album. Zaccai’s brother Luques is on four tracks that include the hugely appealing ‘Joust’ and ‘Last Call’. Mike Boone takes over for the remaining tracks. Aurelien Budynek – who along with Zacchai was on a track of the week in these pages in June (see above) plays guitar on ‘Message’ a whopper that weighs in at almost 11 minutes in duration. Julie Acosta contributes spacey vocals to the title track.
Zaccai and Curtis among the personnel are in the live performance video above of Richard Rodgers’ ‘Lover’ recorded last year at New York club Dizzy’s.
Curtis wrote and arranged all eight compositions on the record. Styles like cáscara – as you’ll find on Eddie Palmieri’s ‘Revolt/La libertad lógico’ – check it out above – and montuno patterns are fed in dominating from the bass.
On earlier album Cubop Lives (2024) cáscara occurs on a track called ‘Cuban Fantasy.’
A family affair ZC’s dad Ted produced Sonoluminescence which was recorded in a Paramus, New Jersey studio called Trading 8s.
To wrap this quick review in order to return to even more listening is preferable. Otherwise doing boy racer like road doughnuts skidding all over the page might ensue. Or like a pool typist whose herbal tea has been elevated by the addition of some kind of amphetamine, suffice it to say: far away from the world of word salad preparation the leader’s silky lightness of touch is nuanced and graceful. Embedded at the heart of the rhythm section he dances to the music of time. He even coaxes out a bit of terpsichore. The frowning reluctant might helplessly be unable to restrain rebellious limbs from going rogue to all this. Curmudgeon damascene conversion time? Yes. Probably a good record to not sit po faced to unless you want to come over as a complete prat faced with such a rhythmical riot of infectious action gyrating back atcha.
