Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher

...and throw in the kitchen sink, and call them the Punk-Funk All-stars.

What happens when you mix the following elements:

Vernon Reid (Living Colour, Decoding Society, Yohombe Bros.)
Joseph Bowie (Defunkt, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Yusuf Lateef, the Contortions)
Melvin Gibbs (Decoding Society, Rollins Band, John Zorn, Caetano Veloso)
Ronald Shannon Jackson (Decoding Society, Ornette Coleman, Power Tools)
and guest James "Blood" Ulmer

?

You get some pretty amazing stuff played on tour. It is busy, growling, ecstatic, and fun.

Having heard some of the live footage from their July performance at a festival in Amsterdam, I have to say that this is a ridiculously muscular and noisy outfit doing some refreshingly uncontrived material. It borrows from the back catalogs of all its members, and the result is stuff that collides Tony Williams Lifetime and Ornette Coleman's PrimeTime, No Wave with No Regard for Rules, deep Delta blues with wide floods of post-punk derived cacophonic mayhem.

There are two shows on dbtree.org