There is a ghost smiling over Eric Mingus's album, but it's not who you expect. Mingus may have grown up in a broken jazz home, but the most recognizable influence on Too Many Bullets, Not Enough Soul (Some Records) is that of Jimi Hendrix. Not so much the axe-wielding wild man as the sensitive singer-songwriter, whose songs and vocal delivery stretched bluesy delicacy across a wiry frame. Eric Mingus has a great voice, and a powerful presence, as anyone who has heard him sing with Carla Blay's band would testify, yet it has taken him a while to forge a personal style as an artist.
His previous album Um...Er...Uh...essayed the Hendrix-influenced style with songs such as Shake up the World and Romantic Fool: stark ballads over cycling chord sequences underpinned by his deep, non flashy bass playing. Too Many bullets takes this further with the help of guitarist/producer Elliot Sharp, whose downtown sensibilities add a touch of 21st century paranoia to the melange.
The result is a collection of soul-bearing, breast-beating songs that renew the blues rock heritage made weary by Glastonbury regulars. Mingus's delivery is not always up to his ambitions and Sharp's quality control (and budget) could have done with being set higher, but this is a brave brash album that deserves a close listen.
Roll With the Demons rocks over a Bo Diddley rhythm;Take a Look at Yourself features a wild overdubbed choir of Minguses over which the singer wails against the interlocutors, who ask: "Are you a black man/ Are you a white man?" The title track voices his urban worries over a rattling, growling solo bass line, with shade of Gill Scott heron : "Young child wanders out of parent's view/This city seems to suck the children away/All they needed was a place to play." Good Buy Pork Pie is a soliloquy; its roots lie in the time when my jazz dictionary defined rap as a "discourse or dialogue between hipsters".
Ori Ire (Egbe Oduniyi) by Kevin Haynes and Groupo Elegua is another contemporary album that glances back. There's a big dose of that early 1960s Afrocentric vibe, with percussion, chants, sung vocals and spoken word pitted against a swinging rhythm section and solo sax. Nothing wrong with that: the style and approach still have plenty of scope for musicians and listeners, whether the intention is to tell a story, provide a launch pad for improvisation or generate a mood and groove. Pianist Bennet McLean is a good foil for the leader's alto sax and contributes a sparkling ( and quote-laden) solo in the driving Rumba Para Senegal.
Some tracks feature three Bata drums in addition to a basic jazz quartet, and haynes's alto hops within the thicker of percussion in a way that occasionally recalls Trevor Watts's parallel explorations with the Moire Music Orchestra. Haynes actually began his career as a dancer before taking up percussion and then saxophone. Lying Waiting start with an acoustic bass line not unlike Eric Mingus's; Ori Ire, in which Niles Hailstone intones word by one E Elen, takes us into the jazz/poetry twilight that also informs Too Many Bullets. The sensual Osun, similarly lengthy at nearly 10 minutes, also uses narration- this tim by Yawande Ogunnakie. Haynes briefly steers the album into dinner jazz mode for the romantic, quartet only track Tears Rolling Down Her Face, but returns to pure percussion and vocals for the closing Medley for Babaluaye and Shango. Ori Ire has a dancer's grace -its light touch the polar opposite to Too Many Bullets' dark self doubt. Film-makers in search of instant atmosphere will lap it up.