Now here’s a man after my own musical heart. Untied to any single genre or set on creating some easily classifiable, Mark Wood’s La Mezcla takes a tastemaker’s approach to the DJ mix and applies it to the musical medium: the album. Sadly, on his only release, on La Mezcla we hear all sorts of styles — jazz, new age, balearic, minimal, and neoclassical (to name a few) — and all sorts of world influences — Asian, European, African, Latin American — fusing together, building not as a collection of songs but a long statement of moods blending into a single vision, where each song has room to strike out uniquely, yet be part of the others around it.
Kudos goes out to the wonderful MMC label, England’s own attempt to build an ECM-like hub, for taking a chance on Mark. Mark Wood was a completely self-taught English guitarist who began his career as a journeyman jazz session man who transitioned into putting his spirited mark in more overground Pop music. Rather than try to sidle him into the smoother leanings of some of their more sanguine releases, they paired Mark with simpatico musicians like Michaels Giles (of Giles, Giles, and Fripp fame!), Peter Lemer, and Chucho Merchan all deadly jazz-rock or prog jazz heavies who could flesh out this interesting compositional corner Mr. Wood wanted to dig himself into.
Whether backing up or writing for burgeoning starlets like Louise Goffin or guesting on out-there jazz combos like Ian Carr’s Nucleus, if one bothers to actually check out the pieces Mark contributes on, one hears his distinct calling card. A master at the guitar and guitar synthesizers, Mark (in his own way) brought an immediate forward-thinking sensibility to works that could easily fall into some dated, rote or overwrote category.
For 1988’s La Mezcla, as stated by Mark in the liner notes, “The album attempts to portray a view of how cultures collide and mix musically.” Much like the great ambient fusion albums of the decade, what once was misunderstood as background muzak now really grabs you for its easily accessible blend of jazz technique and world music.
The title track that kicks off this album, surely, puts you there – instantly. Here, we hear multiple sonic vignettes shift tonalities and puzzle-piece together divergent styles that find shapes within to join. It’s Mark Wood trying to further out the ideas struck on by Mr. Metheny’s own fourth world-esque vista building. “Fourplay” then sticks that fork on another junction, sprawling through a gorgeous blend of neoclassical quartet motifs and synthesized ambiance. In those two tracks the scope is set. This album is more mirage than set vista. Every track will keep us on our toes.
“Rainmaker” takes you to the shores of the Mediterranean. Here Mark vocalizes and brings to mind the parallel ideas heard in the work of Joan Bibiloni. Here his acoustic guitar becomes this percussive, joyful thing, beaming through myriad, shifty Latin rhythms stuffed into a song spanning jux six minutes in length. All that’s left to this bit of the album is for Mark to shift gears, once again, and play a gorgeous Harold Budd-like track dubbed “Dream J.D.” to show yet another swatch of his taste. As the A-side closes on the moody ambient tango jazz of “Be Yourself” nothing could be truer. Mark’s true self (on audio tape) is refreshingly broad loaded. Expect the unexpected.
As the Simon Jeffes-like opener of the second side fades out, “The Soft Loft”, this solo segue of electronic brass, hints at further sprawl to eke through. On the flip side, my favorite track “User Friendly”, finds Mark tapping into the world of Brazilian MPB to create yet another world. Not quite jazz, not quite bossanova, hints of sampled transistor radio and wayward synthetic sounds places it in that spirited pantheon of the best “floating music”. Light as a feather, it shimmies it’s slow way down in irregular ways that just captivate. Then, as the coda harkens on the beginning, the group isn’t afraid to part the seams revealing the mysterious subatomic bits between.
As “User Friendly” fades into “Made In Japan”, another side of Mark comes forward as this serious composer who can understand some of the little-heard Japanese ambient music and treat his audience to his own take on it. I think La Mezcla comes at its brilliance not by discovery but by finding seams it can stitch onto the bigger canvas left unworked by others.
At the end of the day my only wonder is why Mark was left stranded on his own desert island disc, when it seemed he had so much more to take us.