Afro-Blues Quintet Plus 1 - New Directions in Sound (2004)

With 22 tracks and 70 minutes of music drawn from numerous 1966-1970 releases, this is a fine overview of a band that creatively and enjoyably combined jazz with soul, Latin music, and pop, as well as the odd far-out moment. In truth, Afro-Blues Quintet + 1 weren't too adventurous, but that doesn't detract from the sheer enjoyment of a group that put across very accessible (for pop ears) jazz without selling out all that much. At times, it's like hearing a Ramsey Lewis with more guts (and certainly more of an affinity for Latin sounds), particularly on cuts like their cover of Stevie Wonder's "La La La." Or maybe you'll think it's more like a poppier Mongo Santamaria. Certainly they didn't shy away from pop tunes that many jazzmen would have felt too compromising; this could be the only jazz version, one would think, of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra's hit duet "Some Velvet Morning," and Rose Garden's "Next Plane to London" probably didn't find its way into too many jazz repertoires either. Occasionally, they did get a little weird, albeit in a trendy hippy-dippy way, and it's interesting to see the inclusion of a couple songs ("Freaks" and "Victims of Chance") penned or co-penned by Tandyn Almer, most famous for writing "Along Comes Mary." And once in a while they get into a pretty straight-ahead, very modern '60s space that shows they probably could have been a credible, more seriously jazz-centered unit had they wanted, complete with sax showing the influence of the likes of John Coltrane. Whatever's on their table, they do it well, and these are good grooves for '60s soul-jazz fans.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo