The New Boogaloo

Album review

The title The New Boogaloo has a strong soul-jazz connotation; it makes one think of the type of groove-oriented, R&B-drenched jazz that improvisers like Lou Donaldson, Pucho, Jack McDuff, and Charles Earland provided in the '60s and early '70s. It brings to mind an era in which the soul-jazz organists who were coming out of Philadelphia (the capitol of the Hammond B-3), Chicago, and New York didn't hesitate to let you know that they held Sonny Rollins and the Temptations in equally high regard. Recorded in November 2001, The New Boogaloo is mildly funky retro-bop and does, in fact, recall the '60s. But this hard bop/post-bop effort isn't R&B drenched. Trumpeter Marcus Printup doesn't feature an Earland-like organist, and there are no soul-jazz interpretations of songs by James Brown or the Isley Brothers. Instead, Printup delivers a CD that is soulful in a Jazz Messengers/Horace Silver type of way -- hard swinging and full of blues feeling, but not as overtly R&B-minded as Donaldson's Alligator Bogaloo (just to give one example of a definitive '60s soul-jazz release). Heavily influenced by the Blue Note sound of the early '60s, this album rests on the hard bop/post-bop border; Printup's material doesn't sound like it was recorded in 1952 but doesn't completely take the modal plunge (à la John Coltrane) either. No one could honestly claim that Printup originals like "Printupian Prance" and "Soul Waltz" are groundbreaking; like so many of the "Young Lions" who emerged in the '80s and '90s, Printup is quite derivative. But he's also an expressive improviser and a talented composer; to his credit, the big-toned trumpeter wrote seven of the album's nine selections. The New Boogaloo is an enjoyable, if conventional, disc that should appeal to die-hard fans of the Jazz Messengers/Horace Silver school of hard bop and post-bop.
© Alex Henderson /TiVo