Harvest For The World
What's Going On
Trouble Man
Midnight Cowboy
When Doves Cry
Send One Your Love
I Can't Get Next To You
Time Of The Season
Signed Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours
One Hundred Ways
Sunshine Of Your Love
Mining pop classics of the 1970s has been on Dave Stryker’s agenda for a couple of years – at least since Eight Track back in 2014. Now here comes
a reprise of the theme in the form of an eleven-track celebration of songs by the likes of Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder and Price and
it’s called Eight Track II.
Stryker has arranged everything himself, apart from four tracks co-arranged with the organist in his band, Jared Gold. There’s an easy loping shuffle feel
to Harvest for the World and a leisurely balladic swing to What’s Going On whilst vibes player Steve Nelson stands out on Gaye’sTrouble Man, the cooking quartet powered by the propulsive Gold and McClenty Hunter. The leader himself takes an eloquent solo on Midnight Cowboy, its languid and deft figures evoking Wes Montgomery. The band responds avidly to Prince’s When Doves Cry, digging in
with purpose and prodigious energy. The again they can bring out the textually allusive message of Stevie Wonder’s Send One Your Love where a
pervasive lyricism acts as an apt counterpoint to the energy levels to be heard elsewhere. That funky R n B vibe infuses The Temptations’I Can’t Get Next To You as well as the swinging blues of Time of the Season. So, for every mellow opus – such as the James Ingram song One Hundred Ways – there’s an up-tempo finger-snapper like Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love to bring back something of that Strykeresque hot
house vitality.
I can’t say that this is his most imaginative or far reaching album, but it is thoroughly enjoyable; he manages to co-opt their idiom to his own one and in
so doing generates something tangibly exciting.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
