As a musician who has passionately advocated for American roots music since
the Blasters
released their first album in 1980,
Dave Alvin
is widely regarded as a traditionalist, which is not as accurate as it would seem at first glance.
Alvin
grew up on free jazz, psychedelia, and hard rock along with the blues, rockabilly, country, and jump jazz sounds that inform his best-known work, and his project
the Third Mind
is a step outside his usual boundaries that lets him explore ideas he hasn't approached in the past.
was inspired by reading a book on
Miles Davis
that outlined his methods for composing and recording several of his major fusion albums of the '70s:
Miles
would call out a key, set a tempo, and he and his band would improvise at length. After the fact, he and his producer would edit the long jams into a more practical shape.
assembled a set of versatile players to try something similar --
David Immerglueck
on guitar and keyboards,
Victor Krummenacher
on bass,
Michael Jerome
on drums, and
Jesse Sykes
on guitar and vocals -- though for most of
's debut album, they gave themselves a safety net that
didn't. Except for one original piece, "Claudia Cardinale,"
and his accompanists play covers, which gives them some sort of road map to follow, but otherwise the band dove into these songs without prior rehearsal, letting the feel of the moment dictate the arrangements. If anyone was expecting that this would be the album where
would remake himself into an avant-garde noise artist, they get shut down pretty quickly; however, while it's not hard to recognize the rudiments of his guitar style in these jams, he does take the opportunity to stretch out and explore the space around him in a way that's fresh and challenging. There's a folky simplicity in these versions of
Fred Neil
's "Dolphins" and
Tim Rose
's "Morning Dew," but they don't sound simple or unimaginative, and when the group dig deeper into
Alice Coltrane
's "Journey in Satchidananda" and
the Paul Butterfield Blues Band
's "East/West," the communication between the players is smart and exciting. (Whether you actually need three different versions of "East/West," the shortest of which is 14 minutes, is an open question, but each one here is honestly engaging.)
's roots in the blues certainly play a big role in
The Third Mind
, but so does hard rock, psychedelia, jazz, and improvisational music, and this context -- essentially a jam band without audibly hippie-like tendencies -- shows that his willingness to take a risk pays off handsomely. ~ Mark Deming