My review of Scott Kinsey's Near Life Experience, today at All About Jazz.
It's been a full decade since Scott Kinsey last released an album under his own name (the 2006 Abstract Logix debut, Kinesthetics) and, if anything, Near Life Experience manages to trump actually its predecessor in both ambition and Kinsey's significant cast of invited contributors. Near Life Experience also continues to hone the cinematic keyboardist's increasingly expansive, pan-cultural musical world view; one that has long dominated the keyboardist's work, dating back to his days playing with Tim Hagans and Bob Belden's Animation--Imagination (Blue Note, 1999) group...and even farther back to his twenty-year tenure (including a lengthy collective hiatus) in guitarist Scott Henderson and bassist Gary Willis' fusion juggernaut Tribal Tech, beginning with 1992's Illicit (Bluemoon, 1992) and finishing, on a high note, with X (Tone Center, 2012)--a swan song that comes very close to 1991's Tribal Tech (Relativity) as one of the quartet's very finest albums.
Overall, Tribal Tech suggested how an earlier fusion supergroup, Weather Report, might have sounded had it been a keys/guitar/bass/drums/sometimes percussion lineup, with every band member contributing the latest technologies available for their respective instruments and with a stronger predilection for delineated soloing rather than WR's largely career-long keys/saxophone/bass/drums/percussion configuration that, including group co-founders Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, was more about an "everybody solos and nobody solos" aesthetic. Kinsey's own work--which must surely also include the superb collaborative group, Human Element, which released its 2011 Abstract Logix debut after a premiere performance (with Ranjit Barot substituting for the unavailable Gary Novak) at the 2010 Raleigh, NC New Universe Music Festival--has gradually evolved, over the past two decades, into something which is undeniably the sum total of its many past parts--past parts that also include Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, Gnawa and Gamelan music (amongst many African and Asian influences)--but which has become, by now, something more intrinsically personal and unmistakably Kinseyian.
Kinsey's opening "Rave"--dedicated to Belden, who passed away too young at 59, in the spring of 2015--exemplifies everything that is consistent (but evolving) about Kinsey and many of the things that are new with Near Life Experience. Despite being a relatively small quartet setting, with bassist Tim Lefebvre and Hungarian drummer Gergo Borlai (both apparent newcomers to Kinsey's recording circles) joining the wonderfully unpredictable Armenian percussion/vocalist/Human Element alum Arto Tuncboyaciyan--Kinsey traverses considerable territory on an energetic six-minute piece propelled by Borlai and Tunçboyaciyan's relentless groove, while Lefebvre's notes are carefully chosen but never at the expense of maintaining the same forward motion created by his bandmates. That leaves Kinsey plenty of freedom to orchestrate a piece that moves from vamping over a bouncing pedal point to delivering a knotty sequence of changes that, in their sonic breadth alone, must be a considerable challenge for Kinsey to execute live. There are hints of electronica amidst the booty-shaking pulses to give the song's title its validity, but Kinsey's intrinsic sophistication ultimately renders "Rave" as intelligent dance music that gradually soars--rhythmically, melodically, harmonically and, in the end, emotionally--towards its stratospheric conclusion.
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