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George Duke - The Aura Will Prevail CD (album) cover

THE AURA WILL PREVAIL

George Duke

 

Jazz Rock/Fusion

3.14 | 17 ratings

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Evolver
Special Collaborator
Crossover & JR/F/Canterbury Teams
3 stars George Duke's followup to the fantastic "I Love The Blues - She Heard My Cry" is good, but something of a letdown after such a great album. There is mostly good, but not great seventies fusion an the album. And two Frank Zappa songs, Echidna's Arf (in my opinion, one of Zappa's greatest compositions), and Uncle Remus, the latter co-written by Duke with Zappa - we will discuss these later.

The best track here is Floop De Loop, the only original song on the album with a lot of energy. The rest of the songs, while nice, are venturing toward what fusion had become by the eighties, radio friendly easy listening. That trend is mostly apparent in the vocal songs, where Duke croons his bland love lyrics in his cheesy falsetto.

Echidna's Arf starts out amazingly, played faster than I've ever heard it (even by Dweezil's band). It sounds like it's going to be amazing. But then, after the opening section, Duke veers it into a pastiche of spacy synthesizer noises, and never comes back to finish the song. What gives?

His version of Uncle Remus is slower than the "Apostrophe'" recording, and much smoother. While is lacks Zappa's crisp arrangement, I like this version.

So there is enough good music to make this a three star album, It has too many flaw to rate it any higher.

Evolver | 3/5 |

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