Three Larry Coryell Albums

Toku Du is among the "straight ahead" jazz a 1988 set of sessions focusing on jazz standards combining the guitarist with Stanley Cowell (drums), Buster Williams (bass) and Beaver Harris (drums) with results being academic at best. This tunes, Coltrane's "Moment's Notice", Monk's "Round 'Midnight","My Funny Valentine"-- get a neat, circumspect treatment that is gutless at best. The guitarist enters these "straight ahead" projects as if he's doing penance for past sins, or that he's been trying to recover his reputation as a musician since his coke-fueled days in the waning days of fusion. Coryell does better with a later release, My Shining Hour, as he rolls up the sleeves and rags and rages on a material from Miles, Ellington, et al; the playing on the later release is positively liberated and exhilarating, and his band on that session likewise swings and rocks and generally pulses with an verve  the present disc in large part lacks. Coryell always bears a listen, but when he chooses to be bad, he chews a foul root. Not that Coryell has forgotten the jazz-rock that made his reputation in the Sixties, as we can see with Cause and Effect, which highlights the guitarist in a Tony Williams Life format with keyboardist Tom Coster and former Journey drummer Steve Smith. Coryell back in his native land, jazz-rock, and the results are prodigious, fleet, searing. Coster and Smith, keyboards and drums respectively, are a galvanized rhythm section switch-hitting time signatures and polyrhythms with a slamming accent, and Coryell is very much at home, very cutting, swift, brilliant. Freed from the archivist's sense of delicacy with older tunes "in the tradition", Coryell follows his wild, sober instincts and lets the notes fly; he hasn't been this exciting in a fusion context since his controversial work with Mingus. Fine and shredding