Search - The Jeff Lorber Fusion :: Wizard Island

Strong Candidate For Jeff Lorber's Best Album

Andre S. Grindle | Brewer Maine | 02/27/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"You won't get any argument from me that Water Sign,The Jeff Lorber Fusion's Arista debut was a fine,slowly crawling and swampy jazz-funk album. And that alone is a candidate for Jeff Lorber's best album alone. But musically this album is a very different animal. Featuring the same trio as before in the rhythm section this album serves as the introduction of Kenny G(orilick) into the band and in this case he's a welcome addition as his sound (at that time anyway) really helped as he was already quite experience with sophisticated funk from working with Barry White. But this couldn't be any more different than the Love Unlimited Orchestra. Not that it isn't funky as you'd want to be but from a very different source. This album is actually very influencial on how a lot of jazz-funk bands perform today-a small group,in this case a quartet performing very live sounding instrumentation with most of the frills coming from instrumental ability,melody and harmonic ideas. One thing that differs this from most fusion even from this period this music is far from virtuosic or overly mellow. The funk-fusion sound of the album is often enough taken at very fast tempos and the title track,"Sweet","Can't Get Enough","Fusion Juice",Lava Lands","Shadows" and Rooftops" all keep the consistancy level up which in this case is a wonderful thing. "Reflections" is the slowest of the songs and still maintains the same musicallity and high quality as the faster tunes. One important element is how much this album showcases Jeff Lorber's work on the piano rather than a variety of keyboards. Even though it basically follows in the sound of the remainder of the album this "City" always stands out to me for some reason,mainly because the song is so strongly constructed and I love all the different parts to it. It gives ample space for the rhythm section to perform both tightly and loosely. Overall and amazing album and if I could review it 100 times here I would."