The Royal Potato Family

According to Daniel Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain on Music, the quality of music that your brain most easily identifies and latches onto is the timbre. Steven Bernstein’s jazz quartet, Sexmob, has always been masters of sonic texture, imbuing everything they do with a specific atmospheric quality. Similarly, the soundtrack work of Nino Rota, an integral component of filmmaker Federico Fellini’s artistic signature, creates the sense of time and space that anchors Fellini’s post-neorealist output. Sexmob takes a number of Rota’s selections, favoring his work on the films Amacord, La Strada and the seminal La Dolce Vita, and dirties them up in their typical horns-and-rhythm manner. Left to their own devices, Sexmob can occasionally get lost in the worlds they create for the listeners, but as demonstrated here and on the earlier Sex Mob Does Bond, when operating in the context of someone else’s film scores, the band really gets to flex its timbral muscles with supremely enjoyable results.