John Cleary - Pin Your Spin

New Orleans' Jon Cleary is a triple threat with a salty-sweet voice, masterful piano skills, and a knack for stacking infectious grooves with melodic hooks and sharp lyrics. All of his talents are manifest on Pin Your Spin, his tough new Basin Street Records release, produced by John Porter. Backed by his Absolute Monster Gentlemen band, Cleary delivers a dozen original songs with cool conviction and expertise, and reminds us that soul can be spoken in a variety of dialects. Tight-and-right funk ("Got to Be More Careful," "Funky Munky Biznis"), sophisticated balladry ("Smile in a While," "Is It Any Wonder"), and Big Easy-via-Cuba piano ("Oh No No No," "King Zulu Strut") all of these seem to be Cleary's native tongue.

Pin Your Spin even includes a street-corner doo-wop workout, "Best Ain't Good Enough." Sung with Absolute Monster Gentlemen band-mates Derwin "Big D" Perkins and Cornell Williams, the gospel-flavored a-cappella arrangement seems an ideal setting for the song though Cleary admits that the treatment came years after the song's genesis. "It was one of the first tunes we rehearsed when I put the band together ten years ago," he says. "But after trying several drastically different arrangements, I dropped it." The song was resurrected on a recent road trip to a gig in Mississippi.n 2000.