Ruby Soul

Ruby Vroom was one of the great debut albums of the '90s. It was an invigorating, refreshing blend of relentlessly funky beats and downtown beatnik hipster and jazz sensibilities that came around when grunge was the order of the day. Despite the hip-hop/funk heroics of the rhythm section (Sebastian Steinberg on upright bass and Yuval Gabay on drums), M. Doughty's funky white-boy pose came less from hip-hop than the rhythms and cadences of the performance poetry scene. He can be introspective and yearning, as in "True Dreams of Wichita" or "Janine," and has a feel for cinematic description, but more often delivers with the sly wink of a real smart ass. Also, his performance-poetry background means his phrasing and timing are impeccable. Doughty's guitar playing is quite spare, but careful listening will reveal more buried in the mix. The secret weapon of the band, and what really sets them apart is the keyboard/sampler playing of Mark de Gli Antoni. He not only set the bar for sampler players in the pop world, but in the decade since Ruby Vroom was released, no one has even come close to his mixture of inventiveness and musicality.

There was a strong jazz vibe running through some of Philip Bailey's sides with Earth, Wind & Fire. On Soul on Jazz, his second release for Heads Up International, co-producer Bailey remakes several jazz standards, some with new lyrics by his son, Sir Bailey. The foray is most successful on Thelonious Monk's "Ruby My Dear," a percussive take on Gene McDaniels' "Compared to What," and Joe Zawinul's "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." R&B and jazz stylishly intersect on the smooth airy ballad "Unrestrained." Bailey redoes the EWF classic "Keep Your Head to the Sky," giving it a mellow sheen that's close to one of his past cuts, "Children of the Ghetto." On that and his dusky cover of Herbie Hancock's "Tell Me a Bedtime Story" and the loopy "Bop-Skip-Doodle," Bailey flexes his legendary falsetto. More jazz-oriented than Dreams, Soul on Jazz benefits from the sharing of production chores with Myron McKinley, Bob Belden, and Scott Kinsey. The album is definitely on track.

Soul Coughing's second album, Irresistible Bliss, finds the band cutting away some of their eccentricities, leaving behind the bare basics of their pseudo-bohemian fusion of jazz, hip-hop, performance art, and alternative rock. Theoretically, the album should be more accessible; in practice, it is simply less involving. Though some engagingly quirky, off-center avant-pop remains, there are no jarring juxtapositions as satisfying as those that dominated Ruby Vroom, with its melded samples of Howlin' Wolf and the Andrews Sisters. There's enough strong music on Irresistible Bliss to suggest that the album is merely a slight sophomore slump, but that still doesn't make the long stretches of tediousness on the album any more forgivable.