{"id":8476,"date":"2015-09-07T19:16:39","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T02:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jazzusa.com\/?p=8476"},"modified":"2012-09-07T19:16:39","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T02:16:39","slug":"lloyd-gregory-gentle-warrior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/?p=8476","title":{"rendered":"Lloyd Gregory &#8211; Gentle Warrior"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-oembed\">Lloyd Gregory takes his listeners on a musical travelogue on Gentle Warrior, not engaging in a campaign of conquest so much as visiting different locales to sample the musical flavors. The San Francisco-based guitarist starts out in a &#8220;Brazilian Sea,&#8221; accompanied by the soothing vocals of Jeanie Tracy. &#8220;Haiti&#8221; has an appropriate Caribbean rhythm track to support the melodic soloing. At times, Gregory mixes locations, such as on &#8220;Philly,&#8221; which begins and ends with Indian percussion and in the middle includes some sitar-like sounds, even though the overall track is an evocation of the Philadelphia International soul sound of the 1970s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-oembed\">&#8220;Desert Wind&#8221; is a somewhat more abstract physical location, and Gregory achieves its mood with a spare background track featuring a guitar and nature sounds, using his acoustic guitar on top to play some intricate, rapid-fire runs. &#8220;Slither&#8221; earns its name through the slippery bassline that snakes through and actually dominates the music. Sometimes, the title notwithstanding, Gregory is just trying to create an appealing pop-jazz tune, such as in &#8220;Germ&#8221; and &#8220;Zulu, Son of Cobra.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-oembed\">He may be remembering more a time of his life than a place in &#8220;El Espiritu de Diana,&#8221; which finds him producing a more laid-back version of the style of Carlos Santana that&#8217;s more sigh than cry. (A sentence in his press biography reads, &#8220;At one point he paid the rent by playing in San Francisco strip clubs with former members of Santana.&#8221; Clearly, something wore off.) The album boasts more variety than the usual smooth jazz guitar collection, reflecting the musician&#8217;s lengthy experience and mastery of different styles. ~ William Ruhlmann<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lloyd Gregory takes his listeners on a musical travelogue on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8479,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8476\/revisions\/8479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jazzusa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}