Published on Mar 19, 2004
What do you get when you cross a blues band, a bagpipe player, a
roots-rock band, a heck of a tenor sax player, and a small record
label that’s not afraid to mix genres with wild abandon?
While it may seem the answer should be “I don’t know, but it’s
crawling up your arm” (ba*DUM*bum), the actual answer is the debut
CD from Toronto’s Taxi Chain, a rather imperatively named disc
called
Smarten Up! Taxi Chain is not, however, an inexperienced
band. Piper Grier Coppins has been a major force in piping for over
twenty years; he began learning bagpipe at age seven, has won a
silver medal in the World Piping Championships in Scotland, and was
the formative force behind seminal Celtic fusion band Rare Air,
whose six albums helped lay down the groundwork for the modern
Celtic music renaissance. Combine this with the blues-laden sax of
Jim Bish, the honky-tonk blues of Joe Burns’ bass playing, and the
Celtic-influenced rock guitar of Ayron Mortley, and you
get…well…this. Taxi Chain, that is.
This isn’t bad, not by a long shot. It takes a little getting
used to, but Taxi Chain successfully syncretizes at least five
distinct musical genres into something that is unique. The sole
difficulty is whether that unique experimentation becomes a cure
for cancer or something from the musical Isle Of Doctor Moreau.
Most of the time, it’s a cure for cancer. Tracks like “Memphis,”
“James Brown Ate My Bagpipe” (which is the early front-runner for
the Daily Vault Unlikely Song Title Of The Year non-award),
“Tandoori Mustache” and “Zimbobby” work, really well, and leave you
tapping your toes and wondering if you can accessorize a kilt with
a George Clinton hairdo. Unfortunately, a couple of tracks —
specifically the somewhat flat “Buck A Joy” — don’t work quite as
well. That’s not to say they’re not without promise, but it does
seem that Taxi Chain is more comfortable with their instrumentals
than their vocal tracks. In truth I suspect that Taxi Chain will
blow your doors off in a live show — which, of course, I will
never see. (We just managed to get Great Big Sea to admit
Indianapolis exists. This is what passes for progress ’round these
parts).
Taxi Chain is a work in progress, and
Smarten Up! is a fine start. I look forward to seeing what
these masters of the musical Cuisinart come up with next.