Even with all the current focus on the death of a rock icon, good music coming from Minneapolis area will continue. And it’s not all funk, either.
Cory Healey is a drummer, composer and bandleader out of the Twin Cities who with his artfully divergent Beautiful Sunshine debut (Shifting Paradigm Records) continues in the Twin Cities progressive jazz tradition of the Bad Plus, Happy Apple and others. His band, the Beautiful Sunshine Band, are from these and other groups prominent in that scene. It’s all achieved from a fairly traditional jazz configuration consisting of Healey, Brandon Wozniak (sax), Jake Baldwin (trumpet), Zacc Harris (guitar) and Erik Fratzke (el. bass).
Healey’s Beautiful Sunshine Band go almost everywhere in Healey’s debut album, from straight bop to abstract jazz to post-rock to shades of metal, and they often mix it all up for a fresh, unpredictable cocktail. One of their stronger compositions is a euphonic, somewhat plaintive piece called “Wheel,” but what they do that same chord progression later on in the album that bears closer inspection. Heard in the video premiering above, “Wheel Remix” is given a sort of bass ‘n’ drum undercurrent dealt by Healey and Fratzke competing with an ambient flow produced by the rest of the band. Barely lasting one hundred seconds, “Wheel Remix” transforms a solid song into a modern, solid groove.
Catch Cory Healey’s Beautiful Sunshine Band soon either at Elastic in Chicago, IL on May 6 or Lawrence University in Appleton, WI on May 7.
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