Jazz

Self-released · 2 October 2026

“Cool Cat” opens on a rolling Hammond and a lyric that mocks anyone aspiring to seventies cool and gets as far as naming Jimmy Smith. Behind it is Geoff Wilkinson, who has been Us3 since “Hand on the Torch” (Blue Note, 1993) and the “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” built on a slice of Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”.

Wilkinson reopened the project in 2025 with the instrumental “Soundtrack”, and here he brings back MC Akil Dasan, who was there in the nineties: he raps on ten of the twelve tracks. Ed Jones plays saxes and flute, Bryan Corbett trumpet, flugelhorn and trombone, Mike Gorman the keyboards, and DJ Mr Thing handles the scratching and the spoken words on “Walk Away”.

The two tracks without rap are precisely the two Wilkinson credits to himself alone, and they are also the two that let the horns work: “Walk Away”, the sixth, the most jazz-forward thing here, and “The Garden of Forking Paths”, the closer, named after the Borges story. The album buries them, though: the three singles that trailed it in June, July and September are the ones that stick closest to the 1993 formula, and thirty-three years on that formula hasn’t changed at all, not even in how it splits the time between the voice and the band. “Catch the Vibe” adds a verse in Spanish and “Stay Longer” puts Jones’s flute in front of a love song.

Rating: 7.4/10

Text by Aina Torrents