Veteran Icelandic keyboardist reunites with longtime
friend, two-time Grammy® winner Paul Brown, for a soul-jazz album with a
purpose: spreading harmony, love and understanding.
There is nothing in the ten new songs that make up Jack
Magnet’s Woodward Avenue Records’ debut, “Global Warming,” released Friday,
that will inflame naysayers who deny climate change or its impact on the
environment. It’s not that kind of album. Iceland’s popular musical export is
on an entirely different mission: to reset minds using instrumental tunes to
bring back love, peace and understanding to the world. Reteaming with his
collaborator and friend of more than four decades, two-time Grammy®-winning
producer Paul Brown, the keyboardist also known as Jakob Magnusson reenters the
U.S. marketplace with the first radio single, “Still Boppin’ Along,” a jazz-funk
strut.
“’Global Warming’ is all about spreading the positive,
showing empathy and warming up to one another, regardless of place of origin,
faith, color of skin or political views. This album is not about climate
changes and environmental threats. It is about old and new friends coming
together to ignite warm human emotions, seeking to counterbalance all the
negativity, the conflicts and threats we´re witnessing in so many places around
the globe,” Magnet explained.
Magnet’s message of harmony is ingrained in the DNA of the
nine new compositions he wrote with Brown after the two reconnected at a 2012
jazz festival held in the world’s northernmost capital of Reykjavik where the
famed Fender Rhodes keyboardist is based. The pair has roots dating back over
forty years when as teenagers, Magnet - then Magnusson - moved into the Brown
family home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. “Still Boppin’ Along,” which gets a
boost from contemporary jazz hornmen Rick Braun and Elan Trotman on trumpet and
saxophone, was originally penned decades ago during the duo’s pre-fame days yet
it is thematically suited to the tone of “Global Warming.” Brown, who plays
guitar throughout the session, lends an American vibe to Magnet’s Euro-leaning
pop-jazz-blues-rock predilections. Magnet and Brown’s “Global Warming” set list
is heavily influenced by music from the Mojo Triangle – New Orleans, Nashville
and Memphis.
As Magnet describes it, “The music is inspired by the early
European composers who developed the harmony and styles that later became the
foundation of the musical language developed around New Orleans at the turn of
the 20th Century when jazz was born. From Vivaldi, Chopin and Mendelson to Duke
Ellington, Miles Davis and Joseph Zawinul.”
Magnet’s impassioned and lyrical keyboards emote vibrant
and joyous melodies, paint poetic and ethereal reflections, and stir emotions
with storming sermons. Brown’s sister, Kathy Brown-Babylon, gets in on the act
with vocal embellishments on “From The Other Side,” an aptly-titled song that
she wrote with her late husband, Elton John’s longtime bassist Guy Babylon.
Paul Brown was a bandmate of Magnet’s in a British blues-rock group long ago
fronted by Long John Baldry for which Magnet served as a replacement for the
original keyboardist, Reg Dwight, who became Elton John. Also performing on the
cut is the late drummer Ricky Lawson.
Magnet has cultivated a diverse recording catalogue that
boasts jazz notables Stanley Clarke, Freddie Hubbard, Tom Scott and Richard
Elliot as well as pop superstars Elton John and Phil Collins. A colorful and
charismatic multimedia talent in his native Iceland, he starred in and produced
the country’s biggest film in box office history, “Með allt á hreinu (On Top),”
and currently serves as a celebrity judge on television’s “Iceland’s Got
Talent.”
“Global Warming” contains the following songs
“Still Boppin’ Along”
“Funk It Up”
“Florence”
“A Simple Love”
“Strut Yo Stuff”
"From The Other Side”
“Paris”
“Compared To Who?”
“Bourbon Street Boogie”
“JoJo”
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