Cross Currents

Album review

Cross Currents is the first album in four years from bassist Mark Egan. He appears here with his Potent Trio, which also includes New Orleans-based guitarist Shane Theriot (Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Hall & Oates), and veteran Saturday Night Live drummer Shawn Pelton. Longtime fans will hear this as almost radically different from his more pointedly focused jazz albums as a leader or sideman. Before becoming a jazz musician, Egan played in many soul, rock, and R&B bands. Cross Currents is the umbrella enfolding that history with modern jazz and different production styles. Egan wrote six of these 11 tunes and co-composed another with Theriot, who wrote three more, with one by Pelton.
Opener "Ponchatrain" is by Theriot. A funky, Little Feat-esque acoustic guitar vamp introduces a rim-shot snare, handclaps, and, under it all, Egan's gorgeous fretless electric bass. Theriot grabs an electric guitar to play the tags with the bassist, Pelton undergirds it all with a shuffling, syncopated beat, and the song includes a killer guitar break. Egan's "Gulf Stream" sounds like Elements exploring alongside Neil Young and the Meters' Leo Nocentelli. The title cut showcases Egan's funk chops. He offers two basslines: one carrying the backbone-slipping vamp, the other as a melodic lead instrument with Theriot. Pelton is remarkable under the frontline, shifting accents between players, underscoring lines with syncopation, and dropping precisely broken beats. If there were a horn player here, you might mistake these men as a stripped-down version of Galactic. The co-write on "Big Sky" is fueled by layers of rumbling hand percussion under a spacey, fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Egan delivers the vamp, playing directly yet contemplatively over his bandmates, who embrace his line and adorn it with taste and nuance. Theriot's celebratory "Homebrew" is wrangling, taut guitar funk with complex textures from Egan's doubled bassline. The guitarist jumps on a wah-wah pedal in framing his solo, while the rhythm section syncopates the groove and shifts the time slightly to push Theriot. His "Sunflower" impressionistically recalls Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing." Wonderfully deceptive, it initiates as a rock ballad before Egan expands the harmony, and Pelton stretches the rhythm as it evolves into gorgeous contemporary jazz with elegant interplay between guitarist and bassist. "Roll with It" is a moody, minor-key exercise in dubby, bluesy, jazz-inflected rock. The intro to Pelton's "Nonc Rodell" features a pulsing, droning accordion over breaking, rolling snare, long, languid, basslines, and winding guitar chords. It actually suggests the Beatles' all "You Need Is Love" before reshaping into jazz-tinged Americana. The trace of Americana also touches closer "Eastern Blue," a laid-back, breezy exercise in blues and groove with a dancing country backbeat. Theriot's graceful playing delivers sumptuous fills, tasty accents, and chunky vamps over Egan's throbbing bassline, though he solos on the fretless bass. The trio's interaction throughout Cross Currents is laser-focused. A jointly held harmonic sensibility, at once assonant and adventurous, frames insistent yet creative communicative rhythmic invention as these three men pursue the eternal groove.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo