Ernest Ranglin: Gotcha! : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

There's jazz that proclaims how anxious and edgy it is at every turn, and then there's Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin's disarmingly inviting approach. He and his cohorts on Gotcha! -- including pianist Warren Bernhardt, drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Anthony Jackson -- play as if they might be whiling away an afternoon in a beach cabana, but inside their languid reggae grooves, Ranglin's playing bursts with invention and risk.

In his long and largely unheralded career, Ranglin has been all over the musical map. He played jumping swing in Fifties dance bands, all but single-handedly originated the ska guitar style in the early Sixties and then became a first-call reggae session man, long associated with Jimmy Cliff. After a batch of pop instrumental albums, he emerged in the Eighties as a topnotch jazz player, who on recent albums has explored African styles. With Gotcha!, the sixty-nine-year-old Ranglin returns to the percolating reggae-rooted jazz he explored on 1996's Below the Bassline. On numbers like his "Way Back When" and the Melodians' "Rock It With Me," Ranglin ranges from lyrical melody to long, complex, skittering solo lines to lush chordal passages, and sometimes halts to work a single note with the tenacity of a pneumatic drill.

JIM WASHBURN
(June 25, 2001)