Hiram Bullock

Hiram Bullock Carrasco Fantasy Jazz Records 1997 Hiram is one of the more accomplished studio musicians in New York these days, having played on dozens of albums and endless tours - Sting, David Sanborn, Chaka Khan, Miles Davis, Paul SImon, Clapton, and Pete Townsend among many others. He was also known for many years as the barefoot wild man in the David Letterman band. He has over a half-dozen solo albums to his credit, with high points like World of Collision, and Live at Manny's Car Wash standing out. Carrasco however, is a definite lowpoint. He seems to play down all of his strengths (versatile playing and a chameleon like sense of phrasing) and plays up all his weaknesses (cliche smooth-jazz-isms and inconsistent composing). To his credit, some of his good points are very prominent on this album; his warm yet gritty tone (somewhere between Robert Cray and Larry Coryell) and his bluesy voice still sound solid. His choice of support folk is also good (Brazilian stars like Sergio Brandao and Hugo Fattoruso) and ex-Paul Simon bassist Bakithi Kumalo. Unfortunately, they are sadly underutilized on almost all of the album. The album starts with a smooth but tepid rendition of the soul classic What You Won't Do for Love and from there it goes fairly nowhere for almost half an hour until he finally seems to get some inspiration and covers the Chaka Khan interpretation of Dizzy Gillespie's And the Melody Lingers On (A Night in Tunisia) where the musical interplay actually starts to go somewhere interesting, with good punchy percussion and some inspired phrasing out of Bullock's stratocaster. With great sorrow, it is followed by the albums woirst track, Bean Burrito which was probably meant to be a humourous take on food, but the result is a helping of vacuous tunesmithing. The rest of the album is a series of uninspired Bullock compositions that meander between nap-inducing and irritating. By this point, Hiram sounds like he is simply looking to see how little he has to do to finish...and it shows. This is really a disappointment, as Hiram is more than capable of putting out good (if not occasionally a great) performances. Granted, he is generally considered better live, where his showmanship and interplay skills shine(grab a copy of Marcus Millers last live album for evidence), there was really no reason to put out such a half-hearted attempt. It is as if he took all the worst earmarks of some of his former collaborators (i.e. elevator-jazz snooze-a-thon master David Sanborn, and keyboard slop-meister Bob James) and rode them into a refined state of infinite boredom.