1: “Riffin’ Ed” by Medeski, Martin & Wood

I hope to do this for a while…  Select songs to share with people and post them here.

For the first post, a fairly current song from my favorite trio, MMW, a jazz(?) band out of NYC.  The song, Riffin’ Ed, is a strong acoustic offering from the trio, a band that will be featured again here.  John Medeski’s piano-work is sublime and soulful.  Billy Martin’s percussion is garage-sale-funky and well-timed.  Chris Wood’s rou-ound bass is the glue.

The song is from their Radiolarians recordings, created over the course of about a year.  They performed this formula three times: 1) write a bunch of songs, 2) play them in front of their audiences on tour, 3) record an album of the material.

Here’s a great article about the band and the Radiolarians process.  I’ll ignore the fact that they trash mp3’s as a medium in this article.  I assume they know you don’t need vinyl, vacuum tubes and gold speaker wires to really HEAR a song.  Anyone who’s fallen in love with something they heard over some crappy old car stereo speakers knows what I’m saying.  So I’ve taken their comments in the article as a hyper-sensitivity to the quality of a recording rather than snobbiness about how people should consume their music.  Yeah… I think they’d want you to buy their mp3’s.  And so do I.  Give this one a shot.

Enjoy.

Song: Riffin’ Ed
Artist: Medeski, Martin & Wood
Album: Radiolarians II
Label: Indirecto Records
Buy from: Amazon.com | iTunes
Listen: MOG | Spotify
Watch: YouTube

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Watch MMW performing “Think” at the Umbria Jazz Festival several years ago.