Marc Cary stands alongside pianists such as Robert Glasper and Jason Moran in a generation of US jazz musicians who have fully integrated the urban sounds of hip-hop, drum’n’bass and neo-soul into the post-bop vocabulary.
The gorgeous Fender Rhodes electric piano has played a key role in the development of that language, and past Rhodes masters like Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock and Lonnie Liston Smith are all discernible influences on Cary’s fleet fingered, rhythmically hip playing.
Vol. 1 of his Rhodes Ahead project emerged in 2000, so this is not so much a follow-up as a return to the scene of former glories, once more in the energising company of bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Terreon Gully.
