Search - Various Artists :: Up & Down Club Sessions 1

In the early '90s, San Francisco's Up & Down Club hosted a small, highly intertwined scene of jazz musicians and rappers probing the new horizons of acid jazz, rooted in the clubs of London, where the style originally connoted a light funk-soul groove made for the dance floor. In the capable hands of these Bay Area hipsters, however, acid jazz sounds a lot jazzier. Up & Down Club Sessions collects live performances by major players captured at the tiny Folsom Street music joint. Volume 1 boasts seven acts, including the seminal guitar-led Charlie Hunter Trio and rapping Alphabet Soup and lesser known outfits like the Dry Look and Kenny Brooks Trio. Volume 2 adds three more bands, all featuring drummer Josh Jones: Hueman Flavor (with a rapper and singer and Don Cherry guesting on trumpet), the Josh Jones Latin Jazz Ensemble, and the Up & Down All Stars. Pop music listeners will appreciate the Up & Down musicians' general willingness to co-opt familiar styles--a funk bass line, a rock guitar riff--and repeat hooks generously. Rap fans, though, will lament a lack of personality in the rhymers, who mostly blend in with instruments. --Roni Sarig