Medeski Martin & Wood – Radiolarians III – Album Review

(Editor’s note:  I’ve alluded to it in the past, but Medeski Martin & Wood are one of my all time favorite acts. One of the first concerts I ever attended featured MMW opening for the late Mark Sandman and Morphine.  (I’m a dork; I keep this shit.  I have a Toronto Maple Leafs ticket stub from like 1985.)  Since then, I’ve been hooked.  I love listening to this band when I write, I love seeing them live, I love their talent and their ambition and, in short, I love them.  It was a jolt of “I can’t believe this is happening” when we got their new single in the e-mail a few weeks ago and a dose about 100 times that size when we got the whole album.  Doing the music blogger thing is sweet for a lot of reasons, but. perhaps principally, it’s pretty cool to be able to hear music before it hits the streets.  Getting an advance from a band that taught me about the intricacies of  good music is an absolute kick in the pants.   Given all of these factors, this won’t be the most critically restrained review.  I love MMW (with one tiny caveat that we’ll get to later).  I’m going to gush over their new record.  Consider yourself warned.)

Discussion on the new Medeski Martin and Wood record, Radiolarians III (more on the series in a minute), should start with album’s killer second track, “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down.”  (No comma there, at least on my copy, which bugs me, but I’m willing to look past it.)  The track opens with just over two minutes of impressionistic splatters of piano from John Medeski.  (No funky organ here, just straight up piano.)  The notes come in bursts, with unexpected pauses, atonality and all sorts of other music school stuff that’s over my head.  (It’s no wonder Megafaun loves MMW.  That’s my last parenthetical in this paragraph.  Promise.)  He’ll start to drift towards a tune, then derail quickly with freaky flights all over the keys.  Just past two minutes, things start to coalesce, the melody he’s been playing with finally emerges and shit gets funky really quickly.  The melody turns into something resembling ragtime, Chris Wood and Billy Martin join in with something resembling a march and then the dirtiest slide guitar ever blasts to the front.  (Full disclosure:  This thing isn’t in stores until August 4.  My copy is digital, so I have no liner notes.  I don’t know who’s playing the guitar on this track or if it’s even a guitar.  It sure as hell sounds like one, but I wouldn’t put it past John Medeski to do something really ornate to an old organ and fool all of us.  Shit, it could even be a wildly distorted Wood bass line.  I lied about being done with the parentheticals, by the way.)  The slide’s fuzzed out and evil and moves the track through some permutations until everything fades away, leaving a few seconds of bare piano noodling.  It is an exceptional track.  The things that MMW do really well are all highlighted:  super smart musicianship, a willingness to screw around with expectation and time, an ear for the insanely catchy and, above all, high quality.  The album is packed with tracks that serve as a reminder that MMW are one of the tightest jazz acts, or acts in general, for that matter, on the planet.  Dudes are not messing around.

More fascinating, perhaps, is that the trio is pumping out music of this excellent stripe while tinkering with the way in which records are made.  The Radiolarians series is a subversion of the traditional cycle of music distribution, where a band records an album then tours on it to promote.  For each of the discs in the Radiolarians series (of which this is the third), the band wrote briefly, toured playing only the material they’d just written and recorded immediately thereafter.  Adventurous.  Sweet.  Full disclosure:  the first one of these records came out in September of last year and I completely missed it.  2006’s collaboration with John Scofield kind of struck the wrong note with me, the band didn’t come to Cleveland for a couple of years and, sadly, I lost touch with the band as a fan.  I spun Combustication, The Dropper and Tonic as much as I ever did, but I stopped looking for new releases actively.  Clearly, my bad.  For old-school fans who didn’t feel the jazz guitar thing that Scofield brought to the table, you should be back on board with the new material.  It’s MMW the way you remember it from your youth, with a slight bit of maturation and the inventive spirit you’ve come to expect.

The record is loaded down with songs that make me smile.  Medeski takes the Hammond to church in “Won Ton.”  The band channels the acoustic flavor of Tonic in the album’s opener, “Chantes des Femmes.”  Billy Martin’s work on “Kota” is both nuanced and stellar.  (Quick side note:  some of my all-time favorite live moments involve Billy Martin.  I saw him plow through a wild drum solo that concluded with him throwing a tambourine on his snare, which was awesome.)  The dark groove of “Broken Mirror” is also a highlight.  In general, as with most of MMW’s recorded output, put this thing on and hit play.  Not a lot of reason to be skipping around here.

Radiolarians III is available on August 4th.  If, like me, you missed out on Radiolarians I and II, you might consider hanging tight until the holiday season, when the band will release a box set with all three albums and some bonus material.  (Given that I’ll assume the boys aren’t living on the streets, I’d hate to see you buy it twice, although the record label might disagree with me there.)  Medeski Martin and Wood also have a few dates through the fall.  As per usual, if they’re close, don’t miss it.  “Undone,” which you can hear below has been in this space before, but it’s an uver-representative sample of what to expect from the record.  Enjoy.

Medeski Martin & Wood – Undone

As an added bonus, we’ve got the track that I remember MMW closing with that first time I saw them at Cleveland’s Agora.  If you “discovered” Medeski Martin and Wood around the same time I did, this will be a welcome bit of nostalgia.

Medeski Martin & Wood – Crosstown Traffic – Live 1996

Snag Medeski Martin & Wood at insound