Ronald Shannon Jackson - Shannon's House (1996)

In 1996, long after most of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society albums, he returned with Shannon’s House, under the shortened name of Shannon Jackson, still listing his band as the Decoding Society. Yet this is a very different album. With previous efforts, Jackson had meandered his way around the fuzzy boundaries of free jazz, funk and rock, drawing inspiration as much from Ornette Coleman, post-69 Miles, and the kinds of rock influences that worked their way into 80s collaborator, Vernon Reid’s many projects. Reid is not here, alas, but the band remains as accomplished as ever, and guitarist Jef Lee Johnson is no slouch, assisting Jackson in one of his harder rocking albums. Is this one even jazz? Who cares? Jackson also worked on occasion with James Blood Ulmer (another Reid collaborator), and if one looks at some of Ulmer’s better albums on the funk-rock side of fusion, such as his work with the Third Rail supergroup, it could hardly be called jazz. Here similarly, Jackson has no concern for whether or not a jazz purist will scoff because he never did anyway. Instead, he just lays down some propulsive drumwork that lets the band rip through a set of the hardest rocking fusion one hears this side of Mahavishnu. No nonsense, no tricks, no games, not even much harmolodic experimentation. This is straight to the point, and those who listen largely to jazz will almost hear it as rock given the aesthetic, while rock fans unaccustomed to jazz will think something is amiss. Neither fish nor fowl, one may hear, depending on the listener’s proclivities. Shannon’s House is not Jackson’s most innovative album, nor his most surprising, but this is the kind of recording that just gets the job done. Hard-rocking fusion. One would think it is more common than it is, but it takes someone like Ronald Shannon Jackson to do it right.