My parents make their own sauerkraut. Every year they grow a special patch of cabbage, and each fall about a hundred pounds of that hearty Ohio goodness gets loaded into a crock my grandparents brought over from Germany, salted, and weighted with boards. For a few weeks the basement is a difficult place to be without goggles and a rebreather, but once put in jars for long term storage, the final result is breathtaking. My parents’ sauerkraut is a monument to the incomprehensible miracle of friendly bacteria; sweet, pungent, salty, and subtle in equal measure and as different from the metallic harshness of the canned or bagged supermarket versions as the finest homebrew ale is from 40 ounces of Lazer Malt Liquor (Kestrel, for our UK friends). It might not be for everybody, but many a nonbeliever has come away from the table with a new understanding for what good kraut really is.
Jazz-funk is kind of like that. Jazz purists scorn the genre for being too one-dimensional, for being crassly devoted to the simple pleasures of one key and an endless groove, and there is certainly something to that. More sins have been committed with a Fender Rhodes piano and a drum machine than were ever dreamed of by medieval catalogers of the myriad varieties of human perfidy. But to dismiss jazz-funk as more noodling over a repetitive beat is to deny the undeniable allure of solid grooves and burning solos. Yes, when it’s bad it’s bad like sauerkraut from a can. But when it’s good-- when the band is on and taking you higher-- it can make a believer out of the squarest soul.
However, there is a catch. Have you ever eaten too much sauerkraut?
Soulive are a soul-jazz-funk-fusion trio who for nearly ten years have been building a reputation for themselves on the strength of their muscular, grooving live shows (their albums have been pretty good too). Composed of Eric Krasnow (guitar) and brothers Neil (organ) and Alan Evans (drums), the New England group have split their time between jazzhead and deadhead audiences, balancing much like Medeski Martin & Wood between pure jazz excursions and dirty groovefests. But where MM&W never fully embraced their inner hippie and have been turning out increasingly cerebral music, Soulive seem determined to go where only Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley have gone before in making a career out of chasing the Great White Groove.
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