Tarika Blue

The Blue Path

Chiaroscuro

Outstanding, spiritualised jazz-funk; keenly focussed but free and warm; steeped in post-bop and wide-open to r&b; somewhere between Lonnie Liston Smith’s Cosmic Echoes and Roy Ayers’ Ubiquity. Plenty here for dancers, chin-strokers and dreamers all.
The personnel discloses generous musical co-ordinates… Marvin Blackman from the Rashied Ali Quartet is here, and Ryo Kawasaki. James Mason and Justo Almario were later collaborators. Just a couple of years before this, Tarika Blue leader Phil Clendeninn was playing in a New York funk outfit alongside Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards…