Search - Stir Fried :: Last of the Blue Diamond Miners

Gumbo Rock

Sharlene Spingler | New York, New York USA | 08/05/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Last of the Blue Diamond Miners, the third funky, fonic feast from the zone know as Stir Fried. You had best head to your listening bunker with intentions of taking no prisoners. The ingredients of the Stir Fried recipe are cajun delic spices in a quantum rock gumbo that has been marinating for nine years and spreading their musical colesterol around the nation. The members of Stir Fried and featured artists encompass seventy years of musicianship and range in ages from the late twenty somethings to seventy one years yound. Buddy Cage handles the pedal steel guitar, as he did for Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Sly Stone and Rick James. Vassar Clements works a fiddle as he has done for Hank Williams, Paul McCartney and the Greatful Dead. That being just the tip of his fifty year ice berg which includes five Grammy nominations and over 2000 recorded performances. Vocalist, songwriter and guitarist, Johnny Markowski brings a freight train of lineage and talent to the post as he is the son of the late thomas Jefferson Kaye, a musician's musician. Johnny continues in the same vein of harmonic complexity in plot, groove and texture. Bernie Worrel, P. Funk, Hammond B-2 master, Tony Trishka, banjo guru to Bela Fleck, also lend their particular pickins. Jan London, lead guitar, Vincent Lorenzo, peak a boo percussionist. James "foot" Blackford, drums, Rawn Randall, bass, Joanne Lediger, avalanche of a vocalist, dukes it out with Markowski as the vocal as well as musical dominance constantly shifts in their quantum jams. Even the living master, Dr. John, the rabbi of the night, tip toed into the kitchen and sprinkled his uniquely luminous flavorings into three cuts, thereby upping the spook factor into an etheral zone. Stir Fried is not about tunes but orchestral tales that will sweep you up into a story with unpredictable musical conversations. Rather than assault you with the architecture of noise, as is the cureent deconstructive rage, Stir Fried slyly envelopes the listener into a provacitive continuium , the destination of which is delightfully unknown but a deliriously entertaining critical mass."