This comes as a reminder that even on Valentine's Heavy Shit still goes down. Similarly this disc would seem to have come as reminder to the world in '61 that Heavy Shit still goes down in jazz. With the move towards the public adoption of jazz as a foundation of North American cultural identity by the end of the '50s, all but the acknowledgement of the continuing opression of its originators had been accepted into mainstream (read: white) media. This, no doubt, posed itself as a challenge to those great minds of jazz to push the extremely progressive idiom into the stratosphere of experiential composition and performance. No group could be more apt to do this than this colossal meeting of minds, the original Power Violence power trio. As with much of the rest of their catalogue, Duke and Chaz set about recontextualizing and reconfiguring the older musical forms from which jazz sprung with the disintegration of post/hard-bop as backdrop. Max goes about doing what he does best: drop innovative rhythm bombs over everything. The opening drum lick of the title track(and track in its entirety) was arguably the most brutal moment in jazz at that point. What makes this record destructively brilliant is that none of these musical muscles hold back whatsoever. The full-on audio assault of the album's rockers as well as the floating serenity of the ballads are all treated with the same tastefully immersed participation (or lack thereof) of each musician featured here.
Money Jungle is an atmospheric stew of the physical substances of jazz's underbelly - hooch, prostitutes, switchblades, drug money, session joints - distilled into a freely interpretive and rhythmically liberated landscape.
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