Review

The Root Sauce: Firewalker (Freestyle)

Freestyle continue with their quest to bring fresh and contemporary sounds and it gets no better than 'Fire Walker" by The Root source, from the off the title track a, slice of samba modal madness, shows off the tightly honed skills of the band and the extremely well crafted arrangements.

The brainchild behind this operation is keyboard player Andrew Fairclough a modern day Brian Auger with his tough, gritty hammond playing and fusion Herbie type, rhodes playing.

'Soul Space" starts off like an organic echo of the Propellerheads but develops into something far more harmonically complex driven along by the wonderfully named Larry Clack on drums and the groovetastic Spencer Brown on bass.

With the first two track taking up a whopping twenty minutes of needle space,you definately feel like you're getting your money's worth here! Their mix of dance floor jazz,samba and funk is right on the money and it's plain to see why the likes of Snowboy and Gilles Peterson. They draw on the fast legacies of the genres they're mixing with much applomb and will no doubt keep the many listeners, they so richly deserve in a vice like grip!

Andrew's a bit of a space cowboy too tackling Charlie And The Chocolate Factory's Oompa Loompa Song! A slow burner that reveals yet another jazz floor filla. The layers of musical maturity unpeel gracefully and assuredly before your eyes on this rahther classic platter. A rather splendiferous affair covering more or less the whole spectrum of warm jazzy loviness! Superlatives are not needed hear for yourself.
Words Emrys Baird