Love Letters
Like Brian Bromberg, this veteran bassist isn't usually content to take the low road. He plays a six-stringed, electric bass and spends a lot of time in the upper register, often sounding like an acoustic guitar. But some of the highlights on love letters take place when gerald veasley stays low to the ground. On the whimsical sax-bass duet "Valdez in the Country," he engages in a call-and-response pattern with the bubbly-as-always soprano sax of Grover Washington Jr. (with whom Veasley has long toured). The low notes of Veasley's bass contrast with Washington's, creating a nice sense of space. They go on like this over a chunky funk groove before Veasley moves up a few notches for some duet lines.Teaming up his penchant for moodiness with the atmospheric, hypno-exotic possibilities of guitarist Chieli Minucci makes for a perfect fit, and Veasley swings low under Minucci's high, searing electric and esoteric piano motif on the perfectly titled "Hypnotize." Veasley himself wrote "Love Letter," but it sounds like the kind of dreamy, happily spaced-out experiment that Minucci has done on his non-Special EFX recordings. Bassist and guitarist match note-for-note after a few minutes of Veasley in a supporting role."Reaching Out" and "Facing West" are more typical Veasley. The first cut finds him hamming it up with a retro-"Superstition"-styled bass bounce under a crazy-cool honking melody by Eric Marienthal. On "Facing West," he creates the thick, percussive grooves by machine and then lets his bass skip to-and-fro with both melodic lead and harmony line. The resulting effect is like sped-up Metheny.--- Jonathan Widran, JAZZIZ MagazineCopyright © 2000, Milor Entertainment, Inc.--From Jazziz