What do you get when you cross a blues band, a bagpipe player, a
\nroots-rock band, a heck of a tenor sax player, and a small record
\nlabel that’s not afraid to mix genres with wild abandon?<\/p>\n
While it may seem the answer should be “I don’t know, but it’s
\ncrawling up your arm” (ba*DUM*bum), the actual answer is the debut
\nCD from Toronto’s Taxi Chain, a rather imperatively named disc
\ncalled
\nSmarten Up!<\/i> Taxi Chain is not, however, an inexperienced
\nband. Piper Grier Coppins has been a major force in piping for over
\ntwenty years; he began learning bagpipe at age seven, has won a
\nsilver medal in the World Piping Championships in Scotland, and was
\nthe formative force behind seminal Celtic fusion band Rare Air,
\nwhose six albums helped lay down the groundwork for the modern
\nCeltic music renaissance. Combine this with the blues-laden sax of
\nJim Bish, the honky-tonk blues of Joe Burns’ bass playing, and the
\nCeltic-influenced rock guitar of Ayron Mortley, and you
\nget\u2026well\u2026this. Taxi Chain, that is.<\/p>\n
This isn’t bad, not by a long shot. It takes a little getting
\nused to, but Taxi Chain successfully syncretizes at least five
\ndistinct musical genres into something that is unique. The sole
\ndifficulty is whether that unique experimentation becomes a cure
\nfor cancer or something from the musical Isle Of Doctor Moreau.
\nMost of the time, it’s a cure for cancer. Tracks like “Memphis,”
\n“James Brown Ate My Bagpipe” (which is the early front-runner for
\nthe Daily Vault Unlikely Song Title Of The Year non-award),
\n“Tandoori Mustache” and “Zimbobby” work, really well, and leave you
\ntapping your toes and wondering if you can accessorize a kilt with
\na George Clinton hairdo. Unfortunately, a couple of tracks —
\nspecifically the somewhat flat “Buck A Joy” — don’t work quite as
\nwell. That’s not to say they’re not without promise, but it does
\nseem that Taxi Chain is more comfortable with their instrumentals
\nthan their vocal tracks. In truth I suspect that Taxi Chain will
\nblow your doors off in a live show — which, of course, I will
\nnever see. (We just managed to get Great Big Sea to admit
\nIndianapolis exists. This is what passes for progress ’round these
\nparts).<\/p>\n
Taxi Chain is a work in progress, and
\nSmarten Up!<\/i> is a fine start. I look forward to seeing what
\nthese masters of the musical Cuisinart come up with next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":26641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6991],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-37889","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-taxi-chain","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37889"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}