Sol Time 2024
Changed Lives
Houston skin-hitter harnesses classic tropes to contemporary sensibilities to rein in improv expanses and get away with it.
Some drummers find taking a back seat and laying down a backbeat comfortable – but Tim Solook think of his role in different terms: that’s why the American musician has been on a solo path for almost two decades now – after more than a score of years playing with various ensembles. The master’s fifth full-length offering under his own name, “Changed Lives” is quite an impressive opus with numbers which veer between trad jazz and fusion without trying to reinvent either subgenre while bringing the veteran’s melodic originality to the fore. Surrounded by four friends whose sympathetic approach accentuates his imaginative grooves, Solook forges ahead gently, if insistently, and even when Tim indulges in baring a piece’s percussive track, it’s just to pay tribute to his hero or outline his creative territory.
In any case, the drums-only cuts – the boisterous “Steve Gadd” and three parts of the elegantly paced “Rhythm Suite” which are scattered across the record to shift from straight patterns to Latino motifs to African jive – wouldn’t go over a 76-second mark, yet they serve to remind the listener, in style and with gusto, that what’s happening here is driven by a tempo vision. However, when “January” sees Solook’s delicate funk cushioned with David Craig’s velvet bass and fleshed out with the sheen of Andrew Lienhard’s ivories and Warren Sneed’s sax, Tim’s naked beats get lifted off the ground and reach for stratosphere before Paul Chester’s luminescent guitar licks elevate it all higher still. And though “Free Sample” adds vibrant twang and sweet harmonies to the otherwise too-elegiac flow, the band demonstrate the entire scope of their leader’s wish to swing in “I’m Not Sayin’ Nothin'” where organ and woodwind dance around his kit until the piano-splattered platter’s title track turns the drift into a romantic trip.
So once the unhurried “Old Friends” had revealed catharsis behind the shimmer and bottom-end shenanigans, the triumphant samba of “Twenty Three” couldn’t sound more playful. And “playful” is a key to understanding the gist of this brilliant album: life-changing it might not be, but enhance one’s existence it surely can.
*****
