Nathan by East ft. Nathan East…
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[5.00]
Mallory O’Donnell: Smooth and crossover jazz is the perennial whipping boy of tastemakers, but artists like East carry on regardless, crafting danceable, groovable smartly-played nuggets like this that get limited attention from mostly southern urban radio outlets. This has been going on since the heyday of Bob James and is expected to continue well into the next millennium. It’s pop music’s loss that it scarcely cares.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Come on in; you can observe the music industry eating its own long tail: accomplished supporting players convening to explicitly recall marquee names. There’s a sadness in the passage immediately preceding Mr. Talkbox’s entrance, a sort of windswept soap-opera loneliness. Anyway, I like the pensive bits better than anything on “Get Lucky,” which was nothing but middle.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: To look kindly upon “Daft Funk,” there’s a lot more film-score interstitial than bar-band jam in its late night glide. When the robots show up, however, it doesn’t really matter: not even Daft Punk is satisfactorily doing Daft Punk anymore.
[4]
Scott Mildenhall: Some of the worst moments on Random Access Memories came when it became an extended noodling session, a chance for “the guys” to just “do some musics” in a way that left it resembling the type of lounge music that only exists in jokes about lounge music. Nathan East wasn’t actually involved in a lot of those moments, but by the sound of this he enjoyed them: overlong, largely wordless and inexpressive; not really anything to pay attention to.
[4]
Anthony Easton: An abstraction of Daft Punk’s deft synthesis, it seeks to return both funk and disco to their jazz roots. Though East is not Miles Davis, he does a passable job.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: Nathan East has been around: he’s a founding member of the smooth jazz supergroup Fourplay and has been a session star for decades, co-writing Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’s “Easy Lover,” playing with Eric Clapton for years, and most recently providing the awesome bassline for everyone’s favorite single of 2013, Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” He’s just now made his first solo record, though, and waggishly titled its single “Daft Funk,” in tribute to his French buddies (it even features vocoder-ized vocals). It’s got a lively bassline, of course, and a vocal line about how “tonight we’re gonna celebrate.” This is just so perky, which is a quality missing from too much smooth jazz these days — a perfect summertime, drinking-umbrella-drinks record.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: Party in an elevator.
[4]
Alfred Soto: I can recommend several college bands who can use the swing.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, come on.
[5]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The word “funk” should indicate a little bit of grit and grime, a stench, something to screw your face up. It shouldn’t be antiseptic — to be so is against the idea of funkiness. Nobody told Nathan East, the bassist for everyone from Toto to Ronan Keating to — yes — Daft Punk. “Daft Funk” piggybacks off the success of “Get Lucky” in a totally blasé fashion, offering little more than memories of the last time you listened to the mega hit. It’s well performed, but doesn’t smell like the funk. It just stinks.
[3]