Making a Jazz record is much like designing and building an airplane mid-air. While you may have intimate understandings of how an airplane is built and excellent blueprints, the rush of the air as you catapult through the sky can make for a weighty distraction. Capital 6 has built a functional flying machine with On the One. It has many of the hallmark features of contemporary jazz recordings (for better, or worse) and is certainly a fun listen.
On The One opens with intentionally sloppy horns organized loosely in open voicings, sliding and groaning over top of a funk groove. It’s not slippery enough to be Bitches Brew, and the players lack the disdain for their audience necessary to carry a comparison to its funkier tracks, like “Miles Runs Down the Voodoo”. Instead, much of this record reminds me exactly of Josh Roseman Unit’s Cherry or at its best, The San Francisco Jazz Collective records. This type of record owes much of its style to jazz kids who couldn’t quite part with their The Meters records. The Groove takes precedence here and the horns are given lots of long tones and repeated figures so you don’t miss a second of the mood generated by the bass and drums.
Compositional highlights for me include “Dante” and “Shobogenzo”. “Dante”‘s 6/4 groove has the horns sit on top of shifting sands of the rhythm section’s expanded harmonic offerings. I also like that this theme gives the horns a bit more melodic content once we leave the vamp. “Shobogenzo” is a winding road beginning with an almost Maggot Brain (Funkadelic) or Santana inspired guitar cadenza at the top of the tune that turns into a fuzzy, psychedelic “Immigrant Song” journey before defaulting back to a funky grove.
The compositions do miss opportunities to make use of its talented horn section to deliver compelling hooks and material that I can’t wait to hear again. By the end of many of the tracks, I can’t quite remember the melody from the beginning well enough to know if it has returned at the end. These are the hummable bits of a Jazz record and they matter.
The thing that keeps our metaphorical Jazz plane in the air is really the improvisational sections and this is where I think the record narrowly misses the ground. Many of the solos are very fun and engaging, however, there are few too many for my liking that makes use of plug-in effects, like filters, filter-sweeps and distortion on the horns.
Let me hear the wood of a tenor’s reed and the room it was recorded in!
Rather than a change in timbre, some of these improvisations could’ve benefitted from varied approaches to soloing. A few nods in the direction of the masters like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane with solos that get deeper into touching on the chord tones with lots of chromatic approaches would’ve been a welcome change. Artists like the trumpet player Avishai Cohen both employ these new textures while never fully sacrificing his dedication to making the changes, except when he misses them intentionally. Another approach would be to go deeper and further into tonal abandonment with Ornette Coleman or Charles Lloyd inspired chaos. Pushing those boundaries would be fun without sacrificing any listenability.
Overall this is a good offering that puts a lot of emphasis on danceable rhythms and each track reaches a climax that highlights this group’s potential as a good time summer festival act. I appreciate its very modern approach to mixing contemporary music practice and audio engineering with Jazz and R&B sensibility but it would benefit from planting its roots deeper in the latter camp.