Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, 'Welcome Home'

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey
"Welcome Home"
(Accurate)

I started my musical explorations thinking Al Jarreau
was a great jazz singer, and there was a time in my life, I
confess, when I assumed Thelonious Monk must have been a
religious philosopher. Two things turned me around to the
Way of Things: I heard my first Charles Mingus record, and
I saw the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey live at Eclipse. Then, I
understood jazz.

Mingus is long gone, but the Jacob Fred boys are very
much alive. In fact, never have I seen a band that is more
alive — growing, breathing, reacting, adapting, affecting
the world around it. No longer establishing themselves as
well-trained hot-shots (the first album, "Live at the
Lincoln Continental") or attempting to obliterate the
restraints of that training (the second album, "Live in
Tokyo"), this third recording — the band's national debut --
finally lives up to the band's name. This is a musical
experience that's not just a little escapist vacation, it's
an odyssey — an intrepid voyage through unfamiliar
territory, a hike through strange and exciting sounds,
chords and free-thinking.

It's another live album, too, as all Jacob Fred CDs have
been. The band tried to record a studio record, but it
couldn't be done. Local knob-twiddler and punk veteran
Martin Halstead was certainly up to the task, but the mojo
wasn't working. The unpredictable nature of Jacob Fred's
collective improvisations is something that can't be easily
pinned down in a studio, and Halstead has called the studio
work, with no malice, the "sessions from hell." Two tracks on
"Welcome Home" survive from those hellish hours: "Stomp," a
quaint homage to the garbage can-weilding stage dancers,
sung by drummer Sean Layton in his best Leon Redbone drawl,
and "Road to Emmaus," a moving ballad written and led by
trumpeter Kyle Wright.

Closing this album with a reference
to Christ's rising from the dead and chatting with two guys
who didn't recognize his glory is somehow ironic coming
from a band of immensely talented musicians who've been
killing themselves for five years in Tulsa's tough local
scene in hopes of ascending to their rightful place in the
musical pantheon. (Wright has also written a 20-page piece
based on the Creation. Hadyn, shmadyn.) The seven
sermons leading up to the righteous postlude are soulful,
indeed.

All but the two studio tracks were captured in two
performances at Tulsa's Club One, and they show a band that
has grown into its own not by emulating anyone but by
focusing intently on each player's gifts. The normal
pattern for a jazz song is to lay down the riff, then let
each player take turns soloing. In songs like "Seven Inch
Six" and "MMW," Jacob Fred lays down the riff with horns, but
instead of jumping right into the ego-feeding solos, they
slowly and carefully build a song, wrapping some of Brian
Haas' unusually tempered and dreamy keyboards and Reed
Mathis' loping bass around before opening the floor to
hot-shots.

And guitarist Dove McHargue is definitely a
hot-shot, bending the strings during "MMW" with such strength
and control he almost makes the thing talk. For evidence of
the band's peaking compositional brilliance, look to both
"Mountain Scream," a carefully constructed atmospheric
joyride that winds up a breezy Latin dance, and the title
track, an on-the-spot completely improvised song that
sounds like a carefully written and labored-over gem.
Controlled chaos is this band's specialty, and that, I know
now, is jazz. Real jazz. Amen.