Puttanesca

Album Review

A sampling of puttanesca sauce, accompanied by a fine red wine, should not be a requirement before listening to this album, the efforts of a west coast quartet named in honor of one of the more controversial items on the Italian menue. The importance of ingrediants is the thing to remember, Puttanesca having fiddled mightily with both concepts and recordings in a period of a more than a decade prior to this dish finally coming out of the oven.

The listener who is more likely to sit back and listen to a Joe Baiza guitar solo than order a puttanesca sauce will not be let down in the slightest by badass Baiza's participation in this affair. The jazzier side to his playing is featured as well as tight rhythm and blues chops, everything proceeding unhurriedly, all recorded cleanly by producer and recording genius Mark Wheaton.

Vocalist Weba Garretson could be a sticking point, knowing both the rock and roll and avant garde audience's love/hate relationship with female vocalists. The instrumental sound of this combo is hardly "inside" even when the song is going that way, such as on the dynamic "Here I Come". Yet this music sounds better the more Garretson sings in tune; otherwise, monotony is induced by a sing-song intonation that merely taunts the respectable stance of being totally out of tune.

Bassist Ralph Gorodetsky and drummer Wayne Griffin complete this merry grouping and it is a terrific combination of players indeed, augmented here and there by effective brass. "Firecracker Girl" and a brilliant remake of Captain Beefheart's difficult "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" are other highlights. This band will hopefully serve up another portion sometime before 2018!