Billy Martin and Will Blades - Shimmy

Drummer Billy Martin of Medeski, Martin and Wood and up and coming organist Wil Blades come together for a new duo project. The duo's music is at once danceable and highly improvisational.

Track listing:
01. Brother Bru (3.07)
02. Mean Greens (5.23)
03. Deep In A Fried Pickle (7.09) 
04. Les And Eddie (4.18)
05. Pick Pocket (3.53)
06. Down By The Riverside (6.11)
07. Toe Thumb (4.34)
08. Little Shimmy (6.49)
09. Give (5.12)
10. Dehna Hunu (1.07)

Personnel:
Billy Martin - Drums
Wil Blades - Organ, Clavinet

The Royal Potato Family/Amulet Records, 2012.

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Review by Steve Greenlee
Listening to Shimmy, you realize just how responsible Billy Martin is for the Medeski Martin & Wood sound. Thanks to the drummer's shuffling rhythms, Shimmy sounds a lot like an MMW record, but in fact Martin has found a new keyboardist to jam with, Wil Blades, who wreaks funky havoc on the Hammond B-3 and the clavinet, often on the same song, often at the same time.

Blades employs spiky staccatos, sustained washes and liberal use of glissandos on the Hammond-fueled opener, 'Brother Bru', while Martin lays down a rhythm that develops in fits and starts. When Blades brings in the clavinet, on tunes like 'Toe Thumb' and 'Little Shimmy', he does so not only for its singular effects but for its contrast with the B-3. He gets 'Pick Pocket' going with a drippy, watery clavinet timbre, then switches to the Hammond with the drawbars set to roller-rink perfection. Blades enjoys adjusting the drawbars; he constantly tweaks them while serving up a funky rendition of the traditional 'Down by the Riverside'.

But there's no sense getting bogged down in analysis. Shimmy is music for the heart, gut and feet, not for the brain. It's a greasy two-man party that meets somewhere between the great soul-jazz records of the '60s and '70s and the funk-drenched jam-jazz groups of today.


Review by Doug Collette
Any music lover who relished Billy Martin's collaboration with John Medeski, Mago, will not only anticipate the master percussionist's self-produced work with Wil Blades, but be eminently satisfied with it as well.

Apropos the album title, this is less cerebral than that 2007 work and even more accessible. For instance, 'Brother Bru' is all quick, tight stops and rapid unfurling of Hammond B-3 organ in and out of snappy beats. The chemistry Martin and Blades discovered on their impromptu meeting at NOLA in 2001 was no illusion: each anticipates the other's movements with uncanny precision and clearly both love to dig into a groove, but, as they demonstrate on 'Mean Greens', it's not just a matter of repetition, but progressively intricate interaction.

Billy Martin and Wil Blades are too savvy to ignore the dynamics of their partnership. Thus, 'Deep in a Fried Pickle' slows things down, relatively speaking, allowing the former to percolate alongside the latter. 'Pick Pocket continues in that vein, albeit at a more brisk pace, the first real indication of the growing momentum within this track sequencing; reminiscent of the opening tracks, 'Les and Eddie' doesn't so much mark time as allow the duo to shift gears before accelerating further.

Martin and Blades whip through the traditional 'Down by the Riverside', as a means of catching their collective breath in anticipation of ratcheting up the intensity of this affair with the fiery likes of 'Toe Thumb'. Blades' clavinet has become his primary instrument at this point in the roughly forty-seven minute album and this instrumental shift is a necessary and sufficient move to alleviate any predictability as the ten compact tracks unfold.

Likewise, 'Give' is a languorous number positioned as the next-to-last cut on Shimmy, seemingly a setup for yet another high-velocity funk workout. Instead, Martin and Blades close ever so quietly --and unexpectedly-- with the one-minute plus likes of 'Dena Hunu'. A graceful, subdued climax, it serves the purpose of allowing the listener to reflect upon how much style and soul this pair just conjured up.

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MP3 format. 320 kbit/s. All songs are tagged by the book.

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