Listen Up: Third World Electric - Kilimanjaro Secret Brew [2009]

Here's a great disc worth tracking down. I like '70s Weather Report a lot, but being a guitar player, I always wished they had a guitarist. This CD gives you an idea what that would have sounded like: F A N T A S T I C !

This disc is very much in the Weather Report & Zawinul Syndicate [with Scott Henderson] camp - it's a tasty gumbo of '70s jazz-fusion and ethnic/world music. Of course it doesn't hurt that the band features some seriously good players - The Flower Kings' Roine Stolt, Jonas Reingold and [ex-FK drummer] Zoltan Csorsz along with drum monster Dave Weckl on three tracks. Scott Kinsey [Tribal Tech keyboardist] put out an album called "Kinesthetics" in 2006 in a similar style, but I find "Kilimanjaro Secret Brew" much more exciting and interesting.

Each track offers jazzy grooves and African soundscapes that give the players plenty of space to solo over. However, unlike the super indulgent '70s, everything is kept very controlled and concise. And that's the big attraction of this disc: everything is just right. The rhythm section is excellent on every track [wonderfully nimble fretted and fretless bass playing by Reingold], the synth textures are perfectly '70s, and Roine Stolt provides some nice guitar textures, including some wah pedal, to add some crunch. The icing on the cake is the recording itself: crystal clear and very dynamic, unlike the super compressed CDs that are typically produced these days.

I have really been enjoying this hard to find CD lately and highly recommend it. It's a travesty that such a great album has no major label support and limited distribution [it's on the bass players' label Reingold Records]. But I won't beat that dead horse any more.

Available from Abstract Logix, Audiophile Imports and other online sources.

1 Waterfront Migration
2 Ode To Joe
3 Capetown Traffic
4 Downbeat Dakar
5 The Lava Juggler
6 Kilimanjaro Secret Brew
7 Tincan Robots
8 Children Of The Future

Jonas Reingold (fender & warmoth basses)
Dave Weckl (drums)
Zoltan Csorsz (drums)
Karl Martin Almqvist (tenor & soprano saxophones)
Roine Stolt (guitars & keyboards)
Ayi Solomon (congas & percussion)
Lalle Larsson (piano, rhodes & synth)