David Sancious - Forest Of Feelings (2014)

Forest of Feelings is keyboardist/guitarist/composer David Sancious' debut solo effort after leaving Bruce Springsteen's employ. He not only played keyboards on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and the title cut on Born to Run, but also arranged them. A musical polymath, Sancious never met a musical style he didn't like -- or couldn't master. Here he is fully under the sway of jazz-rock fusion and progressive rock. Produced by Billy Cobham, Forest of Feelings features Sancious on an army of keys -- Hammond B-3, clavinet, Moog, acoustic and Rhodes piano, etc. -- but also on guitar (on which he is just as proficient, if not better). His bandmates are drummer Ernest Carter and bassist Gerald Carboy. Cobham makes a guest timpani appearance on the opening stunner, "Suite Cassandra," a tune that takes inspiration in equal parts from Bach, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Return to Forever, but isn't derivative of or beholden to any of them. The playing here is as fluid as it is knotty. "Come on If You Feel Up to It... (And Get Down)" is screaming funky jazz-rock, with Sancious displaying his guitar heroics while the rhythm section breaks the tune's architecture all the way down before sending it soaring. Without at all being patronizing, Sancious reinvents "Dixie," thoroughly reharmonizing and recontextualizing it in a brief two-part suite that carries within its expansive reach all the historical and social darkness that greeted its melody in the civil rights era. The title track, with its legato phrasing and raging argpeggios on acoustic piano (before the wall of electronic keys kick in), reveals his command of jazz language as it meets rock head-on. "One Time," with its precise serpentine melody, contains a deep funk backbone, a jazzman's sense of syncopation, and rock & roll dynamics. The guitar solos are both meaty and spiraling. Closer "Further in the Forest of Feelings" has a rhythmic intensity that recalls Mahavishnu Orchestra on Inner Mounting Flame and the emotionally soulful expressiveness of Santana during the Caravanserai era. Forest of Feelings is an auspicious debut that delivers not only a mastery of various musical genres, but a holistic view of them. Just as the whole fusion thang was moving toward an increasingly irrelevant technician's language devoid of any cultural connection other than its own, this culturally advanced, spiritually open set hit the shelves. This music sounds as refreshing and life-affirming in the 21st century as it did in 1975. [The Esoteric reissue has been beautifully remastered by Paschal Byrne and contains new liner notes with Sancious quotes by Sid Smith and a bonus cut played on solo piano, entitled "Promise of Light."] -- Thom Jurek