Scott Amendola Trio: Lift

Scott Amendola Trio
Lift
SAZi
2010-10-19

The Scott Amendola Band may have shrunk to being the Scott Amendola Trio, but this doesn’t mean that the go-to drummer of modern jazz can’t continue to exercise his stylistic reach. Accompanied by fellow renegades Jeff Parker and John Shifflett, Lift plays like a quick tour through Scott Amendola’s career as a sideman. “Tudo de Bom” and “Lima Bean” sound like the laid-back funk of his tenure with Charlie Hunter and T.J. Kirk, but “Cascade” and “Death by Flower” take things down a weirder path akin to his other full-time commitment: the Nels Cline Singers. The straight forward rock-oriented beat of “The Knife” is one of those things you never expect to hear on a jazz album, but the variety it brings is refreshing. Lift not an album that will stop time, but it’s proof that Scott Amendola should release an album as a bandleader more often than every five years.

RATING 7 / 10