Phil Ranelin, left, and Marcus Belgrave of Tribe at the JVC Jazz Festival on Friday night.
JVC Jazz Festival in Review
by Ben Ratliff, New York Times
photo credit, Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
The New York Times, June 23, 2008
Le Poisson Rouge
Tribe was a musicians’ collective and a record label and a
magazine started in Detroit in the early ’70s. It operated in a selfempowerment,
community-building spirit that was similar to
other musician-run cooperatives in Chicago and Los Angeles and
St. Louis, all outgrowths of the Black Arts Movement. Tribe’s
sound was street and chic and spacey, but always concerned with
straight-ahead entertainment; these musicians had gotten their
chops through Detroit hard bop and Motown and the Ray
Charles band. They were the local elite.
The trombonist Phil Ranelin, the tenor saxophonist Wendell
Harrison and the trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, among others,
recently recorded a new Tribe album in the old sound, this time
produced by the Detroit techno D.J. Carl Craig, a club-music
superstar one full generation younger. The record comes out in
the fall, and the band has already started promoting it. Mr. Craig
himself was supposed to appear with the band at Le Poisson
Rouge on Friday night, adding electronics to the band’s set and
then performing his own late-night D.J. set afterward.
But Mr. Craig did not make it to New York. Strangely, it didn’t
seem to matter. His attachment to the JVC Jazz Festival show —
heavily promoted by the festival — didn’t seem to do its job in
drawing a crowd. The three older musicians, with a younger
rhythm section, played a set of new and old instrumental music
with socially conscious spoken-word inserts, and giving a few
New Yorkers one of those necessary periodic lessons about jazz
history from other parts of the country.
It was especially fascinating to hear Mr. Ranelin, a player whose
name is associated with ’70s soul-jazz and free jazz, because he’s
such a disciplined player in the hard-bop mold. His solos used
long, warbling tones, then changed into stiff percussive blasts
and smart melodic lines.
Mr. Belgrave, well known as a teacher but still underrated as a
performer, played subtle, wide and logical solos on trumpet and
fluegelhorn that were like compressed pieces of wisdom. Mr.
Harrison played the most mannered and authentic ’70s solos,
fitting the tone of the music (and Mr. Ranelin’s poetry) with
honks and flurries and shouts.
The music used ebb-and-flow vamps, a little boilerplate
rhythmically but with shrewd harmony; the mentholated music
sounded like electric Miles Davis meeting James Brown’s backup
group in the early ’70s, and a bit like the European downtempo
electronic music it inspired in the early ’80s. In the back line
were musicians with mostly Detroit roots: Kelvin Sholar on
electric piano, Damon Warmack on electric bass, John Arnold on
guitar, and Jaimeo Brown on drums. But this was a wandering,
solo-oriented music, and most action came from the old heads
up front. BEN RATLIFF
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