Watts and company provide soulful syncopations with social commentary, blessed with complexity, power and imagination, with Marsalis’ serpentine-fired sax, Blanchard’s towering trumpet tones, and McBride’s Afro-blue basslines.

Jeff “Tain” Watts’ new CD, simply entitled Watts - with tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and bassist Christian McBride - is an excellent twenty-first century example of percussion and politics, swing and sarcasm, and improvisation and irony.

The title of the CD refers to the leader’s last name, and also corresponds with the CD cover shot of the famous Watts Towers, which is the symbol of the notorious mid-sixties Los Angeles race riots, and the hometown of the mercurial bassist/composer Charles Mingus, a key inspiration for this new project.