What do artists who not only have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of music but also able to present it on their own deserve? Absolute recognition, but what they usually end up with is the recognition of a few fanatic critics and a small, cult audience that doesn’t want to restrict their musical tastes just to one neat genre. Maybe most of us just love our neatly defined musical niches a bit too much.
The case in point - another man from Liverpool, Edgar Jones. He just recently came up with ‘The Way It Is 25 Years of Solo Adventures,’ a three disc-spanning anthology of his rummage through the history of modern music. And by modern music, I really mean the whole span of it, even if he skipped a bit on modern classical.
But, covering such a wide ground obviously seems to have been too much, not only in the last 25 years of solo work but now too. Except for those who are familiar with Jones and all his solo incarnations that include all the variations he could come up with with ‘Jones,’ it is quietly being unnoticed by a wider audience.
The fact that Jones was behind The Stairs, one of the best garage revivalist bands of The Nineties (their ‘Mexican R’nB’ album can easily rank as one of garage classics of any decade), as well as his number of sideman gigs with the likes of Paul Weller and Saint Etienne, didn’t help much either.
But, in modern musical terminology, ‘The Way It Is’ is like one of the best eclectic playlists that it would probably take you as many years to collect as it took Jones to record this material. Why a playlist? Because you can start playing this anthology from anywhere, turn on a shuffle and you will get the same effect.
Brilliantly constructed songs that invoke more genres than the fingers on both of your hands, that still have a continuing thread of being composed by one artist, his ever-expanding imagination, and an excellent voice to make it all work, almost perfectly. If you ever needed an abbreviated musical reference of the modern music history done by one artist, you should have this one on your musical reference shelves.