at a glance...

Hometown: Metuchen, NJ
First Recordings: 1981

Personnel:
Dennis Young: vocals, percussion, marimba, keyboards/synths, guitar, programming
Sal Principato: vocals
David Axelrod: bass
Gerry Carboy: bass
Michael Gribbrook: horns
Brian Van Korn: djembe, guitar
Jon Francis: electric banjolin, effects
Jeff Kalmar: electric guitar, electric violin

Bands in the family :
Liquid Liquid, David Axelrod, OIA, Water Torture Chamber Music, Fist of Facts, Carmen Gallo

Notes:
Percussionist and marimba player for early-80s post-punk-funkers Liquid Liquid, Dennis Young’s musical legacy will always be tied, somewhat surreally, to hip-hop, by way of LL’s “Cavern” providing the sample bed for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “White Lines” (and by proxy all the dodgy songs that sampled that classic, hello Ice Cube). With nine releases under his own name and a host of guest appearances (with OIA, Carmen Gallo, Fist of Facts and Water Torture Chamber Music), however, he’s certainly produced a broad body of work, one that has taken in influences from rock, funk, and world music.

Dennis Young is the percussionist from a band called Liquid Liquid. It's no use pretending that you'd be reading this review at all, otherwise. Old Dog: New Tricks is a self-released album by a "serious" musician on the wrong side of 40, sports a terrible title and even worse artwork, and generally needs all the help it can in calling attention to itself. Luckily, with music critics running out of new wave funk groups to canonize, membership in Liquid Liquid makes for a nice calling card these days. Which must be a nice change of pace for Young: one imagines the role of percussionist in a cultish art-dance act hasn't opened a lot of doors over the years.

But so goes fickle fashion, occasionally casting its approving glance over even the least fashionable music. Yes, you can breathe out now: this is not another punk-funk record to test your patience for sonic vogueishness. There's a hint of the herky-jerky funk and - quelle surprise! - percussion overload of the Tom Tom Club, and lyrically it's oblique in ways likely to please those of us who think Tom Verlaine was underrated as a wordsmith. But somewhere along the way Young decided to take his new wave kit and make a jazz album on it. Old Dog: New Tricks is, at heart, a kind of post-alternative jazz-fusion album.

Wait - come back. Really, it's quite excellent. Much of the material is song- or groove-based, and there's not a saxophone in sight. Fans of Sunstorm or the early Verve will dig "Falling" and "Beautiful Dream;" Phish-heads looking to escape from the land of twiddly solos and carnival music would find a comfortable home here. There are even tracks here that recall, for better or worse, the more adventurous moments of The Doors. It's another album, though, that casts the longest shadow over Old Dog: New Tricks - Miles Davis' Bitches Brew.

Consciously or not, Young and his collaborators (including former Liquid Liquid vocalis Sal Principato and alt/psych godhead David Axelrod on bass) have captured the sound and spirit of that momentous moment in electric jazz, despite a completely different approach to song composition (more structured) and a more varied sonic palette ("Games of the Heart" takes in electro, dancehall, and hard rock, while various flavors of African and Eastern percussion appear throughout). But if you've ever spent a long night entranced by the disturbing voodoo of electric Miles, you will almost certainly appreciate this record. While it's certainly not going to change the course of music like Bitches' Brew did, it might make you think twice about the tricks old dogs are capable of. Wait, maybe that title wasn't so bad after all …