Smith Liebman Esen Jackson
Flashpoint
(Tone Center)

Get past the tacky cover art, and what you’ll find is a fairly decent electric jazz recording that, lo and behold, seems to be drawing some inspiration from ‘70s and ‘80s Miles Davis in a good way.

Saxophonist Dave Liebman did play with Miles briefly in the early ‘70s, so he was bound to carry some of that over with him. The rest of the combo – drummer Steve Smith, keyboardist Aydin Esen and Anthony Jackson on contrabass guitar – plays with verve and gusto. Best of all, this combo knows to keep the sonic trappings of those prior combos – namely primitive sounding synths, vocoder and synth drums – out of the mix.

Anyone who still thinks that the only thing that came out of later era Miles and Weather Report was smooth jazz and bad instrumental music masquerading as jazz needs to hear this disc for an example of musicians who get what the masters were aiming for in their misunderstood late-period works. You’ll never hear Decoy the same way again. - Michael Fortes