David Bach - Otherworld - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

FAME Review David Bach - Otherworld David Bach's evolution as a keyboardist is interesting. An Air Force brat, he took to the piano so ardently that he never had to be hectored to practice. Then, from base to base, he lucked into really good teachers, and, through his teen-aged years, deciding upon the choice of intelligent aficionados the world round, got into progrock during his time spent in Europe when prog was peaking. Lucky bastard! At the same time, he caught onto jazz with Herbie, Chick, Keith, and others-hell, if you were into prog, you could hardly avoid jazz-and made his decision to turn in that direction. My sentiment since the 70s has been that Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, and others are the next phase in neoclassical musics (welded to no end of permutations of Romantic/Impressionist/etc.), and I fought with professors in college over that. Dave Bach's stance has been that Corea, Jarrett, and others are the new classical musician-composers, and he went toe to toe with his profs-to little avail if I'm reading the inferences in the promo lit correctly, and thus left the classical world that had also been beckoning him in order to pursue a much better grail. All those various influences landed him in the fusion/World/Serious Smooth Jazz realm, and that's what you get with Otherworld. The opening cut, City Lights, brings the funk 'n da groove in a way that'll have Bob James dancing the funky chicken in the streets. Much of the rest of the disc hits more or less on Yellowjackets / Rippingtons / Jasper van't Hof / Joachim Kuhn / Passport venues, intelligent musics you can dance to. Angels, my favorite track, gets a good deal more serious without becoming at all pretentious, less kick-yer-heels hip, instead reflecting the classical/chamber tangent that surfaced in his early studies, something Pat Moraz woulda come up with in his later solo output, in between Refuge