Featured Artist: Scott Kinsey

CD Title: Kinesthetics

Year: 2006

Record Label: Abstract Logix

Style: Fusion

Review:

During the early 90s and onward, the quartet Tribal Tech helped raise jazz-fusion from the ashes, given the musical climate and burn marks the genre often subjected itself to.  Keyboardist Scott Kinsey was a vital member along with guitar god Scott Henderson and other group members lending their wares here. With an all-star cast, Kinsey embarks upon a Weather Report-induced stylization, used as vehicle to strut his multilayered keys and textural soloing endeavors.  Topped off with world-beat grooves, darting synth lines and faint vocal treatments, Kinsey steers the flow with a Joe Zawinul-like sound and methodology. 

The percussionists enact jungle sounds in alliance with the drummers’ staggered or peppery off-beats.  Comprising a few boogaloo shuffles amid saxophonist Steve Tavaglione’s emphatic jazz-drenched choruses, Kinsey’s often exotic synth patterns maintain a sense of wonderment.  In essence, he morphs power, solitude and a sequence of terse chord clusters to intimate fluidity in motion atop a buoyant, jazz-fusion/world-music flow of events. On the flip side, many of these pieces seem transient, largely due to melodies or thematic movements that simply don’t stick.  Kinsey compensates by allowing the soloists ample breathing room, where mini-motifs generally blossom into sinuous opuses, evidenced on the odd-metered and perky, jazz piece titled “Quartet.”  Otherwise, there are some sweetly orchestrated ambient interludes to offset the more penetrating segments, where entertainment and cerebral motivations attain a happy medium.

Record Label Website: http://www.abstractlogix.com

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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