Album Review: Benny Brucebar: Live at the Smokehouse

Fri Dec 09, 2016 8:17 am

There's not a lot you can't say about legend, Benny Brucebar, Jazz pioneer, scat backer, marquee salesman.

This album, recorded live at the Smokehouse in Benny's native Chincinago 6 years after his death, manages to capture the essence of a man who could never be pigeon-holed. Borrowing from his earlier recordings and using an elaborate system of wires, producer Jack 'The Lemon' Squeezer has made an album that is both timeless and of it's time, that exists in space and outside of it, that burrows through the gaps in the mind and slips down the back alley of consciousness into a warm bed of decaying flesh, and out the other side into a farmyard full of crying animals waiting to meet their maker.

The second track on the album, the eponymously named 'Eponymously', encompasses the full range of Brucebar's work in a single, delirious 35 minute extravaganza, syncopated blues rhythms melting sonorously into free-jazz, swiping sidelong with back of the fag-packet free-form algebra, before returning back to its origins with a full rectal-reentry.

In a word: Frequently.

1/5

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