Falling With Grace (24 Bit Remastered)

In the 1990s, Boston had one of the healthiest jazz scenes in the U.S. — one that offered plenty of avant-garde experimentation as well as a lot of straight-ahead hard bop. Boston had as much bop as Philadelphia and as much avant-garde activity as Lower Manhattan and Chicago. One of the mildly avant-garde combos that surfaced in Beantown in the 1990s was Plunge, a pianoless quartet consisting of trombonist Mark McGrain, tuba player Marcus Rojas, acoustic bassist Avishai Cohen, and drummer Bob Moses. Plunge's debut album, Falling With Grace, is left of center but only slightly so — this is hardly an album of atonal screaming and blistering free jazz à la Charles Gayle or late-period John Coltrane. Rather, Plunge's specialty is a quirky, eccentric style of acoustic-oriented jazz-funk; for the most part, the group isn't nearly as far to the left as Ornette Coleman & Prime Time or electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma. But, at the same time, no one will mistake this 1995 session for the type of commercial jazz-funk that the Crusaders (as opposed to the Jazz Crusaders), David Sanborn, and the late Grover Washington, Jr. are known for. Tunes like "Mungo," "Beneath the Wheel," and the Egyptian-influenced "Just Ask Alice" are undeniably funky and groove-minded, but they're also mildly abstract. One of the CD's more abrasive offerings is "Dog"; most of the time, however, Falling With Grace isn't harsh or abrasive. Plunge favors an inside/outside approach, and the Bostonians are more inside than outside on this enjoyable and fairly promising debut.