Bounce with the flow

I saw Terence Blanchard in concert at Purdue University a few weeks ago and commented to my buddy Carl Abernathy at one point that Blanchard and his band had a real Miles Davis' electric era kind of thing going, albeit it an extending of some of the ideas Miles laid down not by any means a knockoff.

You can hear it in his latest CD "Flow" as well, for instance where he plays off the guitarist Lionel Loueke's vocal African chant, which serves as the main instrument on the introduction to "Wadagbe" and remains part of the ensemble in the body of the song. As an electric guitar player, Loueke is hard rocking but with touch like former Davis guitarist Mike Stern. Add in various electronic flourishes, bass and percussion, and a saxophone that sounds like a snake charmer's horn and you get, in sum, a sound theater for Blanchard to work his trumpet magic in, as Davis did with his electric bands. Likewise the title track, done in three movements spread around the disk.

Everything on "Flow" isn't a heady musical experiment, however. A lot of it is straight-ahead modern jazz, although more advanced than most and never entirely conventional. Take "Benny's Tune," a lovely ballad that seems to have roots in "My Ideal;" "Wandering Wonder" or "The Source," hard boppy runs with electric touches and some great Blanchard solo work and comping (and powerful piano playing by Aaron Parks on the latter); and "Harvesting Dance," which works off a Spanish-inflected Derrick Hodge bass groove to create something like an electro-acoustic bullfight theme. Kicking drums from Kendrick Scott, too.

I think "Flow" and its 2003 predecessor "Bounce" say that Blanchard has to be considered among the most creative band leaders, as well as trumpet players, working today. Herbie Hancock, himself a musical searcher for decades, didn't produce this (and play on two cuts) for the exercise.