Active Resonance

Guitarist, composer, and master mixing engineer Robert Musso has issued another chapter in his evolving space-dub jam session recordings. This one features many of the usual suspects — Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, Aiyb Deng, Bootsy Collins, and some others, such as the late Thomas Chapin, Jonas Hellborg, and Tanar Catalpinar. The assemblage offers a new listen to Musso's integrational conception of opposites attracting under the influence of rhythm. Here, the post-modal jazz of John Coltrane is heard as it meets the dawn of 1990s funk-dub world-fusion on "A Dream Supreme," and the shifting sands of global cowboy-ism as it voices its desolation on "Alliance." On "All Funked Up," Afro-funk meets the J.B.'s with Bootsy on grunting cheerleader vocals. And so it goes, with the only cohesive glue in the cracks being Musso's disciplined direction, excellent guitar playing, and his indomitable sense of groove no matter what the genre stipulations — check "Tanar!" with its muezzin wailing over a wall of deep space dub. Or the Eastern-tinged modalism of "Home Growing," where it meets the terrain of euphoric jazz and rock. Recommended.