May 30 - June 6, 1 9 9 6

Chuggin'

Little Anthony & the Locomotives steam ahead

by Marc Levy

As the principal songwriter for Little Anthony & the Locomotives, Anthony Geraci, who's also the band's namesake and pianist, doesn't seem to mind that he has mildly disparate elements to reconcile. He originally recruited gospel-trained singer Karl Kelly and a brass section rooted in jazz. And Geraci himself is a Connecticut-born fortysomething blues and jazz man who ditched the Berklee School of Music after almost three years to hit the road with guitar virtuoso Ronnie Earl and Mudcat Ward in the mid '70s. He later played keys with Sugar Ray Norcia and the Bluetones and was a charter member of Earl's Broadcasters in the '80s.

The disparate elements find a cozy mix on Little Anthony & the Locomotives' new CD Don't Wait on Me (Deluge). When these guys -- and gal guitarist Annie Hamel -- are on, their sound has some of the bluest soul in New England, moving from moody, rolling R&B compositions to fiery, big-band jumps. Most notably, they strike home with traditional blues themes like revenge, jealousy, or righteous been-done-wrong anger.

Tunes like "Tell Me That You Love Me" have the trademark skepticism about love and a cautious tempo to enhance the distrustful atmosphere. "Bustin' My Butt" is a throwback to Eddie Boyd's "Five Long Years," but, instead of willing servitude to a woman ("I'm chuckin' steel just like a slave"), the character is doing "four years hard time, that's what they gave me."

"We (Kelly and Geraci) wrote that song when we were staying on Block Island, and we woke up in the morning and outside there was a crew laying tar. It was the kind of thing where you're just glad it isn't you," Geraci said in a telephone interview from his Rhode Island home. On a CD soaked with more styles than you can shake a mojo stick at, this number has the bluesiest feel. And Kelly does a little role-playing; his voice twangs nastily, not unlike the way bile might sound oozing through speakers.

[Little Anthony] On the new CD, the band's second, Geraci has the horn section chugging out front. Aside from the occasional Geraci lead or Hamel single-string line, their sound has moved beyond the blues tradition as a reference point. The funk-driven horns are the gas pedal, clutch, and brake, not the grillwork, fancy gold trim, or smokestack on this southbound locomotive. The results sound like an experiment in church-going rhythm and soul, with a nod to blues mythology and jazz styles.

The arrangements uncannily mirror the sentiment of the lyrics. The Smokestack Horns (Amadee Castinell on tenor sax, Gordon Beadle on baritone sax, and Matthew Bowman on trumpet) get busy upsetting the natural, relaxed baritone of Kelly. Between their metallic screams and Kelly's thick-as-Mississippi-mud deadpan, there's a tension that fits the tunes' disturbing subjects.

At the outset of "Baby," a plaintive, first-person about a joe whose lover is scarce come nighttime, Kelly's helpless character doesn't let on to any rage. Yet in no time the thrust and parry of the horns whip Kelly into a frenzy that peaks at his sax-like shout. Even before the trumpets do a two-refrain mimic of Kelly's vocal line, the listener is braced for this moment, as if the outing of his jealousy is a glorious event. This is what the horn section gets off on; if Kelly is goaded into a terrifying, preacher-esque scream, which he often is, then it suits the mood of alarm the horns evoke.

Occasionally, Geraci lets the listener off the hook from his molten mélange of nasty themes and densely packed compositions. "Free Thinking" is an eight-and-a-half-minute instrumental jazz ramble led by his piano and supported by various trumpet solos. If some of the CDs tunes seem under-realized in comparison, at least there's never a shortage of soul.