Harriet Tubman - Prototype

So I picked up on Harriet Tubman because of first and foremost, Melvin Gibbs (Rollins Band, Arto Lindsay, Defunkt) who I had first really gotten into with his work in Eye and I, via his proxy connection to Vernon Reid (both with Reid guesting on Eye & I's sole release, and in both Gibbs and Reid having concurrent tenures in Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society at its creative peak). But when I first picked up HTs debut, I noticed it had Brandon Ross, whose work I liked with its duality of finesse and avant-fury, evidenced on what I knew then of his work with Cassandra Wilson and Henry Threadgill's Very Very Circus and Make a Move bands.

I figured this would make for some potentially intriguing stuff, but when I first picked it up I was not prepped for that level of freeform improve and deconstructed musical frameworks.

Time and better trained ears do wonders, as does this live album, which is a notable improvement from that debut. Not that the playing has become more traditional, but that the band --filled out by drummer J.T. Lewis-- seems to have found where its grounded and flighty elements can liftoff and land without crashing or flying off into the great beyond without hope of return.

This is a set of live dates and the sound is crisp, cutting, and fills up the space in all kinds of swell ways. I always admired Gibbs for the same reasons I like Doug Wimbish and Tony Levin...they understand intimately what the music needs at any given time, be it a very spacious economy of groove or a dense cacophany of noise. Here this works at least as good as it did with the Power Tools project compositionally, but this is has a bit more punk fire to it. Maybe because they have actually managed to stick around long enough to tour this one and to keep a chemistry builing, maybe because Ross and Lewis are more comfortable in this kind of setting than Bill Frisell. Whatever the reason, it is a great follow up of sorts to that great brief super group.

Ross uses subtle effects to augment his wide variety of phrasings and Lewis dashes from loud crashes of pounding to delicate colors, with Gibbs providing the disjointed funk glue that seems to bind it all together in one barely contained riot of sound. Layers of delay in a manner not too removed from Frippertronics gets belted with Hendrix style wailing. Ornette Coleman tone dialing gives way to big (what I think is) mutron affected bass and odd time tweak out in an organic Squarepusher kind of way. This is wild stuff that builds and collapses in a manner not for the squeamish. But for the truly adventurous this might be worth a slap in the speakerbox.