Reviews

Homegrown

Daniel Lucca Parenti

By Jonathan Herrera | September 2006

Cruise Control [D-Lucca]

Bay Area bassist Daniel Lucca Parenti’s biggest gig was touring behind jazz and pop vocal legend Rosemary Clooney
for several recent years. His solo material, however, reveals an artist
whose personal ambitions extend to modern, electronica-influenced
sounds. Aptly handling a variety of basses, including melody-manning
piccolo, Parenti’s material is alternately laid-back and fused-out
modern jazz. Great playing.

Jazzreview.com
Reviewed by: Susan Frances

Veteran bass guitarist Daniel Lucca’s album Cruise Control is one of the best jazz fusion albums you will ever pick up. Lucca has fused jazz and rock so beautifully that you don’t know when one ends and the other begins. The elements are so entwined that they beat with one heart brandishing the regalia of Steely Dan. Lucca’s music is not rushed, but gingerly plotted with brandy savoring grooves, azure-esque textures beaming with laminated luster, and chords with gorgeous definition, clarity, and warmth. His music has a fire-side/smooth jazz rustle with ambient arcs and trestles coordinated by expert fingers.

Lucca composed and arranged all of the songs as well as bearing the brunt of executive producer. With assistant producers Boone Spooner and Wandah C. Mitchell and collaborator Terry Disley from Acoustic Alchemy on keyboards and synths, Daniel Lucca’s album Cruise Control should be earmarked by his peers as a professional level to be attained and by music fans who are looking for music that courses through their veins like a soothing broth on rankled nerves and uptight emotions.

The album opens with an upbeat jazz fusion dialogue stylized with 70s jazz-funk surges on the title track and “That Funky Bass,” which exhibits smooth jazz saxophones interacting in a lively banter with the bass. The supple tones and caressing movements on tracks like “Everlasting” and “Erowan” project a score of meaningful melodic phrases connecting to emotions and bearing traits similarly to Trey Anastasio. These reflective pieces display gentle playing and responsive exchanges in the instrumentation.

The graphic chord vibrations on tracks like “Baby” and “Light Year” are expressive and organic relatable to a Spyro Gyra fashion. The music for “Zen Of Zinn” is very fertile sprouting stalks of saxophone lines and rhythmic percussive shakers producing an ambient jazz effect. The spoken words of Mitchell and Erhabor on “Distance From Live To Love” give the track a hip hop pulsation when they recite: “We open our eyes to the ultimate surprise/ That we are not yet who we will someday be/ Our minds and hearts are like new and waiting for you/ To show us the way to LOVE.”

The words and music have themes of healing and penetrating a succor resolution. The melodies “’06” and “Light At The End Of The Tunnel” are aurally smooth and tenderly vacillating. The smooth jazz saxophone on “Expresso” and percolating synths are sweetly versed as they wrap around each other and the listener in its homey cove. The lightly rosin guitars play in harmony to the boinging synths and steady shakers. The music chords prance gracefully on “Your Smile” as the saxophone chimes produce rings of vivid roseates. Tracks like Lucca’s Love” and “Experience (Live)” move to a fire-side/lounging jazz tempo while the final track “R. U. Home Yet” basks in country flanged guitar pluckings and light toe tapping beats with a blues-folk texturing whistles through the rhythmic steps.

Daniel Lucca has been in the music business since he was 19 years old when he began recording with such artists as Matt Catingub, Rosemary Clooney, Michael Feinstein, The Big Kahuna And The Copa Cat Pack, Maureen McGovern, Debbie Boone, Tony Tennille, Peter Erskine and many others. He obviously picked up a few things about making exquisite melodies because he does them with the precision of the fingers of a Waterford Crystal’s craftsman. The chord progressions are so finely quilted that you never see the seams. All the elements work together without a note out of place.