Mark Rapp - Token Tales [Album]

Paved Earth Music

September 5, 2009, 10:03 PM

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Trapped in a genre that applauds musical exploration - which makes it hard to record the best moment as development never stops - it took trumpeter Mark Rapp quite some time to come up with "Token Tales", a collection of expressionistic jazz instrumentals drawn from the pictures in the trumpeter's head. Accompanied by Jamie Reynolds (keys), Gavin Fallow (bass) and Kyle Struve (drums), the album lies heavily on psychedelic influences and Chet Baker-like romanticism even though all Rapp wanted to do was communicate his inner self through music like his rocking colleagues do through lyrics and voice.

For a trumpeter who's influences are mainly jazz legends, jazz contemporaries and stubborn artists like Bob Dylan and Radiohead, it's quite surprising to hear him going into psychedelia for most of the time. 'Who's the Man?' and 'Nuff Time' neatly combines the worlds of funk, jazz and psychedelics but by the time 'Mr. Tricky' arrives Rapp is going all the way back to 1967. The song is both poppy and swingy, it breaths musical freedom and it culminates into a very well-thought out craziness. Here it becomes apparent that Rapp has been working on these songs for a long time before the time was right to enter the studio.

Also drawn from the same love of late sixties spirit are his covers of Strawberry Alarm Clock's hippy classic 'Incense and Peppermints' and the Meters' 'Cissy Strut'. 'Peppermints' is especially worth listening to as it sounds in no way like the original song; instead it sounds like a classic jazz performance - incidental piano, swinging drums and a trumpeter on the loose, all based on the riff that brought the original song eternal life. A little less sixties but even more off the road is '1st Minute, 1st Round', where the band experiments within the borders of their own genre. It is this song, along with 'Mr. Tricky' that shows the true capability of the musicians; the electric piano and the sounds coming out of the horn are dark and highly surrealistic, but it still embraces an atmosphere of energy, swing, excitement and happiness.

What Rapp also embraces is his feelings of romanticism, the sweet and gentle side he also needed to express in his own abstract way. On 'Thank You' he seems to be completely lost within himself, like he's slowly dancing with a beautiful dream, while 'Token Tales' and 'My Place' also use love and intimacy as the main musical idea, reminiscing the life and times of the late Chet Baker.

As an album "Token Tales" will take some time to get used to. Not all the songs are winners, it leans on two quite different and extreme moods and it is mainly a series of expressions of the young Rapp giving it a certain lack of direction. Nevertheless, "Token Tales" confirms Rapp's musical abilities and the many roads he could take in the future. Given the fact that Rapp is born to experiment there will be no doubt that one day he will find the sound he started looking for on this album.

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