I’m not sure if “Call Me Crazy” is an echo of a golden age of music past or a sonic signpost to a better future. Both, I guess, and that is a perfect place to position yourself, halfway between familiarity and freshness, nostalgia and adventure. Though I suspect that this isn’t a deliberate ploy, rather the sound of an artist making the music that comes naturally to him.
Gregory Ackerman has done something wonderful here. This soul-soaked, jazz-infused slice of groove is perhaps the perfect antidote to all the quick-hit, sucker-punch, lowest-common-denominator pop and rock output that is currently deemed acceptable by an audience that has grown up in a world where ones and zeros have replaced real musicianship and proper songwriting.
You can almost feel a seventies sun shining through the music. Guitars are happy to lilt and lick; the beats are purely structural, unfussy, yet full of cool moves; the bassline is melodic; and the vocals are gorgeous. Trumpets sway, and swoon, and small sonic touches and musical motifs are scattered through the song, the real icing on the cake. Not only that, it feels wilfully loose and effortlessly groovy. How could any discerning music fan avoid its many mellifluous charms?
As I said earlier, one foot in the past, the other striding to a gorgeous and gratifying new future. Imagine if this were the sound of the mainstream, the charts, the commercial sector, something to replace all that music driven by marketing reports and hordes of producers, wouldn’t that be something?
(The fact that the platform I was playing this on decided in its infinite algorithmic wisdom that if I liked this, it should cue up a track by Taj Mahal says it all!)
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