To some musicologists, it is a contradiction to say that music is "funky yet complex and cerebral." After all, funk (as in
Tower of Power,
Cameo,
Rick James, ConFunkShun, and
the Gap Band) is booty-shaking party music at heart. But in fact, many artists have successfully combined the funky and the intellectual;
Miles Davis certainly did it on his fusion albums of the 1970s, and jazz' electric avant-garde is full of people who hold
Albert Ayler and
James Brown in equally high regard. So bearing all that in mind, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that
Blue Plate Special finds guitarist
Will Bernard getting his groove on without sacrificing his intellectual urges. Stylistically, this January 2008 recording isn't easy to categorize. The music is definitely instrumental jazz -- that much is obvious -- but what type of jazz? It's probably best to describe
Blue Plate Special (which unites
Bernard with
John Medeski on keyboards,
Andy Hess on electric bass, and
Stanton Moore on drums) as a mixture of soul-jazz/jazz-funk, post-bop and fusion (with occasional hints of the avant-garde). Although
Bernard has demonstrated that he is comfortable in avant-garde settings,
Blue Plate Special seldom ventures far into the avant-garde realm; if this 56-minute disc has an inside/outside perspective,
Bernard's quartet plays inside at least 85-percent of the time. Nonetheless, the solos can go into some decidedly cerebral places; most of the melodies and grooves are relatively accessible, but when
Bernard and his colleagues solo, they don't shy away from the abstract. With influences ranging from
Larry Young to fusion-era
Miles Davis to
Medeski, Martin & Wood,
Blue Plate Special is a solid effort -- not quite
Bernard's most essential release, but definitely solid and appealing.