Uri Caine - Toys

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Free Music Notes for Toys

Free Music Review: A forerunner of the absolute highest accomplishment
Hit: 5 Stars

In another sense, he's been entirely vindicated.

Too bad he missed out on the monetary windfall. But hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles. And if the jazz hoi polloi have missed out on this altogether remarkable disc, they've managed to catch up with its progeny, Treats for the Nightwalker, Alegria, and Wide Angles.

What we've got here are flexible, morphing ensembles, geared up to deliver the goods on the leader's slippery compositions: Exactly what you get with, e.g., Dave Brecker's Wide Angles or Wayne Shorter's Alegria or Josh Roseman's Treats of the Nightwalker.

You know what? Uri Caine was there first. And, as with what all too often happens with pioneers, he's gone largely unrecognized. But the seedbed of such future revelatory discs was already incipiently there in Toys.

Come to think of it, it's not all that surprising. After all, Josh Roseman and Dave Douglas are on board here. That they later perfected Caine's MO shouldn't be all that surprising. They're smart guys. They obviously recognized that something pretty happening was going down here, even if it didn't get the recognition it deserved.

So, being the wily dudes that they are, they appropriated this wild and wonderful approach, convinced their deep-pockets labels (OK, not Josh Roseman, who records for that faltering independent, Knitting Factory) to bankroll them, and, Voila! instant genius.

Do I sound cynical? I don't mean to. I applaud such acumen on the part of messieurs Douglas, Shorter, et. al. We, the jazz listening and consuming public, are all the richer for their savoir-faire, albeit somewhat vitiated by a compromised aesthetic.

But deep down, I admit I DO feel that worm of unease that artists of such brilliance as Uri Caine languish in the jazz backwaters as their more savvy peers parlay their glorious gains into financial remuneration, while they continue to ply their progressive bent with scant recognition and remuneration.

So do your part, you who revel and gambol in the, admittedly, sonic glories of Roseman, Shorter, and Brecker: snatch up this sucker, before it sinks into oblivion.

Toys Poster

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