Steven Bernstein has recently revived his wonderful Millennial Territory Orchestra, and with a vengeance. We’re halfway through a flurry of four albums being released only four months apart, all products of four straight days of live-in-the-studio recording.
Good Time Music (Community Music Vol. 2) leaves behind the introspective Bernstein originals of Tinctures of Time (Community Music Vol. 1) for a return to MTO’s normal state of buoyantly covering other people’s songs. That joyful feeling gets amped up by the addition of a singer to take on the lyrics: Steven Bernstein enlisted veteran Grammy®-nominated soul/jazz vocalist and long-time Steely Dan backup singer Catherine Russell to handle those chores.
All of this makes Good Time Music an album I was looking forward to, and now that it’s out, let’s do a go-over on their take on “Yes We Can,” an Allen Toussaint classic originally appearing on a Lee Dorsey album of the same name.
Look, I love that classic “Yes We Can” bass line made famous by the Pointer Sisters’ 1973 version, I even once covered a British art-rock song just because it stole that riff and it’s been further recycled into other great songs. But Steven Bernstein and his crew decided to do something fresh with an old song and burnish up some of the other aspects no one else would think of to make us see an old song in a totally new light.
That starts with Russell, who wasn’t a Pointer Sister, but she sings like she belonged with them. Even without the benefit of backup singers, her sassy, commanding performance carries the song. But beyond that, MTO converts it from a New Orleans R&B song to a New Orleans jazz funeral parade song, with hints of second line from bassist Ben Allison, lively drumming from Ben Perowsky and endlessly happy horn charts from Bernstein (trumpet), Doug Wieselman (clarinet), Peter Apfelbaum (saxophone) and Curtis Fowlkes (trombone).
Good Time Music (Community Music Vol. 2) is now out there, courtesy of Royal Potato Family.
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