Gino Vannelli - A Good Thing (2009)

Gino Vannelli's output over the last decade and a half has been fairly sporatic,pretty typical of what's happened to a lot of people who were musical giants in the 70's. So....while it is true that Gino's innovating days may be over;you cannot go on forever making music like Storm at Sunup over and over again. But that doesn't mean the man doesn't have a lot of great music left in him. This latest from him features nine new songs written by the man himself. The music itself finds a great balance between the nightclub jazz style of much of Gino's more recent music with the R&B of his past,finding a middle ground over which he can lay down his greatest instrument;his voice. Many Gino fans agree that Gino's voice has aged well.In this case I'd tend to agree.In fact I'd go as far to say he sounds more youthful,passionate and energized then he did when he was at his prime. There's no sense of being show-offsky here at all.On the title song,"Night","Knight Of The Road","Evermore" and "Don't Give Up" all put out the best of the sound this album's going for.There's some excellent fender rhodes soloing here,along with some sweet saxaphone.There's also a lot of blues in these tunes with a little light countryish pedal steel thrown in for good measure. On such tunes as "Gypsy Days" the rhythm is turned up a notch and,as with everything Gino does his lyrics are cosmic and top notch.On the highly jazzy "The Dutchboat" and the very funky R&B of "The Measure Of A Man" Gino does up the tempo on two major grooves. The only sad thing about this album is,at the moment it's only been released overseas and for the moment anyway it seems to be unavailable. Hopefully that's a temporary oversight and this will deservadly be available for everyone to enjoy it as they should. ~ Andre S. Grindle -- Amazon.com