Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince (Mack Avenue Records 2LP)

Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince | 2 x Vinyl LP - 2017 Mack Avenue Records (MAC1123LP, vinyl mastered by Kevin Gray, pressed at RTI)

Cameron Graves grew up in the same Los Angeles music magnet programme as Kamasi Washington, Miles Mosley and the Bruner brothers, and by the time the West Coast Get Down formed in the mid-2000s he was its pianist. His influences are easier to list than to reconcile: Chopin, Coltrane and Van Halen, with Prince and Morris Day thrown in. He worked with Jada Pinkett Smith's nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom and with Stanley Clarke before appearing across all three discs of Washington's The Epic. Planetary Prince is his debut as a leader, and the title doubles as his pseudonym, taken from The Urantia Book, a cosmological and spiritual text that gives the album its track titles and its scope. "Satania Our Solar System" is the book's name for our corner of the universe. "Adam & Eve" and "The Lucifer Rebellion" reframe familiar stories through the book's alternative theology. "Andromeda" and "Isle Of Love" look outward.

The music is dense and relentless. Graves plays piano the way a guitarist plays metal: with force, velocity and an intensity that treats the instrument as something to be driven rather than touched. But the compositions are structured, not chaotic. "El Diablo" locks into a groove for seven minutes while the horn section (Washington, Porter, Dizack) trades phrases over it. "Adam & Eve" runs past thirteen minutes with space for everyone. Hadrien Feraud, a French bassist known for his fusion work, plays bass on six of the eight tracks. Thundercat (Stephen Bruner) takes the remaining two, "The End Of Corporatism" and "Isle Of Love," and his brother Ronald Bruner Jr. drums throughout, holding the album together through every tempo change. Graves produced and mixed the album himself at James Hardman Studios and Sterling Silver Productions in Van Nuys. Gavin Lurssen mastered the digital release at Lurssen Mastering. Kevin Gray mastered the vinyl separately at Cohearent Audio, and RTI pressed it, giving this double LP the same production chain as the Blue Note Tone Poet Series. This is the 2017 Mack Avenue Records pressing (MAC1123LP).