Last Chance to Dance Trance (Perhaps) (Medeski Martin & Wood, 1999)

MMW has been getting some heavy representation here as of late. If you are looking for two discs that tell their story (well, up until 2004 anyway), this one (covering the Gramavision years 1991-1996) and Note Bleu (the Blue Note albums from 1998-2004) are the way to go. Note Bleu has already been covered here, so it's my lot in life to cover things backwards.

The trio started life as a piano trio with a more avant-garde thrust than the later acid and soul jazz styles that would dominate later on. Only one track, "Hermeto's Daydream", is from that period, though in later years they would revisit that sound on albums like Tonic, of in the Blue Note era. The other tracks show changes primarily by John Medeski, from piano to organ, to Wurlitzers and other fun keyboards. By 1996, on the songs from Shack-man, bassist Chris Wood would sometimes chuck the upright bass and go electric. Billy Martin has always been an inventive percussionist throughout their career, so it's harder to detect much evolution by him, not that he needed to change things up.

This compilation stops short of the next real phase shift in the MMW story, so no turntables, spoken word bits, or bizarre Mellotron breaks to be found here. The album that had been released just the year before, Blue Note debut Combustication, would introduce all of this stuff, though the Bubblehouse remix EP was a clear sign of things to come. That's all covered in the Blue Note chapter.

As far as I know there hasn't been an Indirecto compilation, which would cover material from their third era/label. A lot of that stuff was done with John Scofield's name on it (Out Louder, Juice), so he may want a credit on that release!