Joe Chambers

Chambers took up the vibraphone in 1970, when Max Roach asked him to join his new percussion ensemble M’Boom. Under Roach’s guidance, Chambers and the group’s other members gathered at Warren Smith’s studio on West 21st Street in Manhattan for a year of Saturdays to become proficient on a range of percussion instruments. Chambers, whose first instrument was piano, took to the vibes immediately. “It was just a matter of getting the sticking,” he said. On Samba De Maracatu, that labor is still bearing fruit on a Chambers contribution to M’Boom’s book, “Circles.” The tune appeared on M’Boom’s 1984 album Collage, and Chambers’ new treatment parallels the format of the earlier version, employing a Bahian rhythm with mixed meters, modal harmony and a sonorous improvisation in which the overdubbed vibraphone and piano play “together.” If the new album has an outlier it is “New York State Of Mind Rain.” The tune brings to the fore a fragment of Chambers’ “Mind Rain” that rapper Nas sampled for his 1994 hit, “N.Y. State Of Mind.” The tune first was heard as a mindbending keyboard duet with organist Larry Young on 1977’s Double Exposure. The new album’s spin-off, a belated response to Nas, incorporates a rap that was smartly penned by his son, Fenton Chambers, and slickly executed by MC Parrain. A stylistic counterweight to that track is singer Stephanie Jordan’s dreamy take on “Never Let Me Go.” Floating over Chambers’ subtle bolero, Jordan’s voice projects the kind of captivating appeal that could land her a spot in a future large-scale recording project of Chambers’—pending, he said, the easing of public-health concerns.

Photo Credit: Christopher Andrew McDonald