Oh, right. The music. What's the music like?
It turns out that The Coalition of the Willing features one of the largest differentials between cover art quality and the quality of the music inside since Guns & Roses scrapped the original "robot rape" cover to Appetite For Destruction for the less awful version we all know and love.
That is to say, The Coalition Of The Willing is a damn good record, eight long instrumental slices of jazz-inflected rock spiked with liberal dashes of surf and spy music, fusion a la electric Miles Davis, and even house and reggae. There's not a slack bit, there are no twiddly precious solos, and all the genre-hopping manages to add spice, rather than just confuse matters.
Previte is a sensitive drummer with a great sense of groove, and the players he assembled for this project are uniformly top-notch. Notably, guitar wizard Charlie Hunter plays on every track, even choosing to lay aside his trademark eight-string guitar for a standard six-string model. And although he is by far the best-known musician to grace these tracks, he doesn't overshadow the other contributors, who include Steve Bernstein (of the unfortunately-named New York group Sex Mob) on trumpet, Jamie Saft on the Hammond organ, Stew Cutler on occasional harmonica, the one-named Skerik, a tenor saxophonist who plays with Les Claypool of Primus, and Stanton Moore, drummer for the jammy New Orleans funk outfit Galactic.
Anyway, about the music. Given that Bobby Previte and Charlie Hunter are pretty well known for playing hip, cerebral, and challenging New York jazz, the last thing I expected when I popped this album in the player was to be met at the door by a groove that is about 50% "Incense and Peppermints" and 50% theme music to some lurid imaginary Roger Corman film with a title like "Surf Nazis Run Wild!!!" or "Bikini Girl Go-Go Shootout!!!"
And yet, the very first track overcomes its Orwellian title ("The Ministry of Truth") with just such a sound, a snazzy, tacky vibe driven by the jet-setting Hammond organ of Jamie Saft and a foursquare beat from Previte that would be equally at home on a Lalo Shifrin album or some lost track from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Over this, Charlie Hunter spits edgy chromatic James Bond-theme-style melodic fragments until he is mugged by a scratchy harmonica solo from Stew Cutler. The whole thing brings to mind a dizzying array of great pop culture moments, from the original Batman TV series to Ren & Stimpy, and that's just in the first five minutes of the record.
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