Sex Mob: Dime Grind Palace

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)


Frankly I thought Roswell Rudd was dead. But here is the great 68-year-old jazz trombonist, sitting in with this hugely entertaining, thoroughly hip, downtown New York quartet.

Sex Mob is the brainchild of trumpeter Steve Bernstein who was formerly musical director of John Lurie's Lounge Lizards, and has written scores for Get Shorty and Robert Altman's Kansas City. He's toured with funkmeister Bootsy Collins, avant-clarinettist Don Byron, Aretha Franklin, Mel Torme and the guru of New Orleans music, Allen Toussaint.

But with Sex Mob he writes swaggering, good time, sexy jazz. And he has the players to pull it off.

Saxophonist Briggan Krauss works with Wayne Horvitz, bassist Tony Scherr was a Lounge Lizard who started as a teenager in Woody Herman's band, and drummer Kenny Wollesen has played with Tom Waits, John Zorn, and Sean Lennon. Not all those names might seem jazz credentials, and that's what makes Sex Mob interesting.

On previous albums they have - like the late Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy - lifted from the pop catalogue and covered tunes by Prince, Michael Jackson, Smashing Pumpkins and the Beatles. James Bond themes are big with them, too. They turn them into fat-back, woozy jazz outings.

Sex Mob have been one of the most amusing and sometimes challenging groups to come of out New York's downtown in years. And for this outing they hook in Roswell Rudd (among others) who was an early inspiration for the band.

Rudd was classically trained, took to jazz and in New York ran into revolutionary black musicians of the 60s who saw the project of jazz - freedom basically - as a political act. He played alongside Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Archie ("let my notes be bullets") Shepp. Later he was in Charlie Haden's Liberation Orchestra, has toured West Africa many times, and once said, "You blow in this end of the trombone and sound comes out the other end and it disrupts the cosmos".

In his case it did. He revolutionised the instrument with guttural howls and parps, and extended its vocabulary from New Orleans to free jazz without sacrificing anything of the jazz tradition. Which is why he's at home with Sex Mob.

They might be silly sometimes (the tongue-in-cheek Blue Danube here) but they also respect and work the tradition.

After a brief slice of marching band honking they get down to business with the funky Kitchen over a monster bass line, there's a splatter of late night New Orleans in their treatment of Count Basie's Blue and Sentimental, they appropriate bits of Worried Life Blues for their slippery Slide Serenade, and there's a mock-grandiose Miles Davis-meets-Dixie approach to Rudd's Norbert's Weiner.

At the same time they are are dub-conscious: Mothra flitters to life like an Augustus Pablo track then embarks on something you'd swear was a searing guitar solo - it's probably slide trumpet. And - with tracks like Call to the Freaks - they wink at you knowingly all the way.

Sex Mob could be a major discovery for you. They are entertaining, more respectful than they first sound, and very smart. Smart enough to get the great - and obviously not late - Roswell Rudd.

Label: Ryko