Last year I put funk fusioneer Jeff Lorber on a short list of guilty pleasures of mine. Sometimes I wonder if that was justified giving him such a back-handed compliment. I mean, Lorber’s got chops to spare and his music makes me feel good most every time I listen to it, as long as it’s the uptempo, instrumental stuff. Especially the stuff from his “Jeff Lorber Fusion” albums of the late seventies and early eighties.
The last in those string of old school funk-jazz albums came in 1981. Galaxian was already hinting at a bid for crossover r&b appeal, as evidenced by the appearance of two vocal tracks. As in his prior release Wizard Island, Lorber’s emerging young sax/flute player Kenny Gorelick was featured on several tracks. But the songs were so irresistibly catchy and in the pocket, even the future G-Man couldn’t mess ’em up.
It was right at the end of this since-deleted title where Lorber reveals himself to capable of much more complex material than he’s let on. The self-penned title track “Galaxian” starts off shaky with dated, space movie styled soaring synths accompanied with a amateurish robotic voiceover but thankfully, it quickly gives way to the actual song.
From that point on. it’s dense, unpredictable and less riff-heavy than what Lorber is known for. “Galaxian” even moves from one interesting idea to another one, liberally changing up time signatures and tempos along the way(I could easily take another shot at the sax player and suggest that he laid out on this song because he couldn’t handle it, but I’m not going to). It even swings.
Put another way, there’s more of an advanced modern jazz sensibility prevailing that’s only hinted at on other Lorber songs. Throughout it all, it remains stubbornly tight and funky and centered around his intelligently played Fender Rhodes in the classic Lorber fashion.
And so, even though there’s plenty of funk-jazz jams of simpler construction that guilty or not, I still enjoy listening to those songs on occasion more than twenty-five years after first hearing them, “Galaxian” is one tune of Jeff Lorber’s that demonstrates what he can do when he was in an especially adventurous mood.
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