The City Blog project is quite an ambitious one. Masterminded by New York City-based composer and guitarist Gideon King, this project brings together a slew of singers and musicians, creating jazz-infused rock music for the average listener. However, much like eating out at a hoity-toity restaurant, where the expectation is that the food will be nothing less than exceptional simply because the chef\/restaurateur has an impressive resume, it seems that this project is all about the different contributors\u2019 musical repertoire. Right from King\u2019s website to the description of this album elsewhere, the on-paper heft of the talent on this record is made out to be a huge part of the musical experience.<\/p>\n
City Blog <\/i>is a pretty well made album, through and through; and yes, King has a long description of the illustrious musicians on this album, who are the main reason for how good the album is. However, the listener does not need to be aware of the supposed \u201chandpicked\u201d talent on this record to enjoy it. This is because this disc is totally unpretentious, and all the name-dropping isn\u2019t all that important to make the experience whole. Although this could be considered a crossover release, it is very much a jazz album at heart. And there is a certain sense of haughtiness that oftentimes comes with consumption of this art form that is so anti pop-music. But with City Blog<\/i>, this is absolutely not the case.<\/p>\n
This is an album that is both sophisticated and simple \u2013 a true crossover that ventures beyond the confines of jazz and into other genres, yet keeps things elegant and unassuming throughout. The list of contributors here <\/i>is long, but never at any point does the album feel like a case of \u201ctoo many cooks,\u201d as it sounds like it has been performed by one cohesive unit, whose members have a mutual respect for one another.<\/p>\n
The whole disc has a chilled-out loungey vibe, which comes from its jazz roots. Even though King is primarily a guitarist, he certainly doesn\u2019t try to dominate the music. In fact, most of the songs are guitar as well as piano-based, with all the other musicians and most importantly the singers, playing important roles, performing in flawless unity. Even during the occasional guitar solos (for instance, on tracks like \u201cNew York Is,\u201d \u201cDirty Bastard,\u201d and \u201cJust Play\u201d), King does not hog the limelight, but still gives a solid performance \u2013 more like a guitar-man of an indie band than a solo jazz virtuoso. However, when he takes the center-stage, he totally nails it, like his amazing acoustic guitar strumming on the album highlight \u201cGlide,\u201d which totally steals the show.<\/p>\n
This project is a tribute to New York City, with said theme defining the sound and lyrics of the album. As a result, this collection of songs feels very urban, and one could picture them being played at a lounge in a big city jazz club by a full-fledged group of talented musicians and true professionals. As King mentions in a rightfully gloating way on his website, \u201cGideon is bringing back real music, with real chord changes, real solos, real instruments, and real humans improvising and lending their souls to Gideon King & City Blog.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":32650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[9785],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-44418","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-gideon-king-city-blog","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44418","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\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44418"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44418"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}