Search - Lee Ritenour :: Banded Together

Finally after nearly 24 years!

Gordon F. Guillot | 02/11/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Owned this on vinyl since the mid-80's, I always thought it was a good album, it was ahead of its time sort of a cross between rock and jazz. I stumbled upon it when working in a music store as a teenager back when the heavy metal bands were over-shadowing just about everything that came out. Has some decent smooth jazz tracks on it, like "Amaretto" which is like a classic. With Lee Ritenour and Harvey Mason that eventually went on to form "Fourplay" it doesn't do wrong. The title of this album says it all "banded together", many artists coming together and making great music, some of those include Nathan East, Patti Austin, Phil Collins, Ernie Watts, and more. It isn't weak by any means, has a lot of stand out points in all instruments and has decent vocals to boot. At least someone realized that it was never released on CD and needed to be. Good on them for doing so, I jumped on it the minute I found it, recommended!"

Lee's most TERRIBLE album!

bispro | France | 12/29/2003

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I'm afraid I have to feel a lot differently about this album than the reviewer below. For fans of pop music, there are hundreds of albums better than this one from the same time period, and for jazz fans or Lee Ritenour fans, this sticks out as the worst album project he ever did! The presence of good musicians, and even Phil Collins on a couple of tracks (who was then doing a superb job for Philip Bailey) doesn't even help.Now something needs to be said about smooth jazz in the 80's: apart from the GRP productions, which still retained a certain upstandard quality, a great deal of the music produced during the years 1983 to 1985 is hopeless, drooling with ever-present synthesizer sounds that literally smother the music and would make a whole retirement house seem young by comparison!If you want the best quality jazz-fusion albums by Ritenour, they are undoubtedly the ones he did in Japan from 1977 to 1979 under the name "Lee Ritenour & His Gentle Thoughts", but they are rare now (3 albums + one with Sadao Watanabe). However, his solo Japanese album "Rio", released in 1979 (and finally released in the US on GRP in 1985) is excellent (it also features a very young and talented Marcus Miller on several tracks).Ritenour's US albums are varied and well-produced, but not necessarily as interesting... At any rate, you'd be better-off leaving out the years 1980-1985, anyway. Good picks? 'Festival' with its blend of jazz and latin music... and if you like straightahead jazz, then 'Wes Bound' will have your preference. The duet album 'Larry & Lee', with long-time rival (and now successor in the band Fourplay) also makes for nice listening, but if you really want a cross between pop and jazz, go for his recent "Tribute" albums (Jobim, Marley, etc.) which are extremely satisfying."

Classic '80s LA studio sound

Mark Petrie | 11/19/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I have boxes full of old cassette tapes at home that I hadn't listened to in years, but I recently acquired a used car that has a pretty nice audio system that is cassette tape based, and the tape player actually sounds good, so I've started going through my boxes to review tapes that I haven't played for I while to see what I still like. I had been a big fan of Lee Ritenour for several years, so when I came across "Banded Together", I took it out for a drive. I liked this album a lot when I bought it, and I still like it after listening to it fresh, so much so, that I went to Amazon to see if there was a CD or SACD/DVD-Audio version of it available. I agree with another reviewer here that it definitely sounds a bit dated, with those big 80's drums and synths and reverb saturated background vocals. But the guitar parts shine through it all, and that of course is what attracts people to Lee Ritenour. I have his more staight-forward jazz albums, too, and if those albums are what first turned you on to Lee, I can see why this album may not be as appealing, or the "RIT" recordings, for that matter, as they are really more Rock than Jazz. I think that Lee, after doing session work on a lot of pop albums, and probably most notably on Steely Dan's classic, Aja, from 1977, decided he wanted to put out something himself that could hold its own in that genre. "Banded Together" kind of strikes me as Steely Dan meets Toto. To me, at least, that's not a bad thing at all."