Guitarist Pat Martino tempered his serpentine, machine-gun improvisational style over the years into a soft-focus, graph paper stencil. His playing, at once mathematically dense and puritanical in its economy, can impress with long bursts of harmonic complexity and stylistic flourishes that cross rockabilly-esque chicken scratch with ECM-style repetition. All of this is on display on his cerebral, blues-tinged 2003 album Think Tank. His third album for Blue Note since 1997's All Sides Now, it finds him paired with the equally protean talents of saxophonist Joe Lovano, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, bassist Christian McBride, and drummer Lewis Nash. Together, they play with a thoughtful intensity that's both meditative and exploding with improvisational ideas. Lovano is an especially intuitive foil for the guitarist with a floating, kinetic style that's well-suited to these flowing compositions. They both spiral through the title song, an intriguing scientific theorem of a tune that Martino built out of the letters in John Coltrane's name. The track, as with much of Think Tank, finds them dancing around drummer Lewis Nash's ever-present swinging groove and bassist Christian McBride's funky drones. Equally engaging is the ballad "Sun on My Hands," in which pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Martino delicately play off each other in a kind of plaintive call-and-response that brings to mind Martino's dusky, reflective 1976 album We'll Be Together Again. Elsewhere, Martino offers up the sinister, Middle Eastern-tinged modality of "Africa," the driving post-bop exuberance of "Earthlings," and the sun-dappled haze of "Before You Ask." Think Tank is a deep album, but never cold. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi

1		Phineas Trane
2		Think Tank
3		Dozen Down
4		Sun On My Hands
5		Africa
6		Quatessence
7		Before You Ask
8		Earthlings

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