Coming at a mature stage of Monty Maxwell’s career, “Shine” can be viewed as the culmination of the artist’s musical strivings. It is truly an embodiment of his personality and experiences; in it the artist never strays far from his roots. The musicians who collaborated with him on the project are mostly from his hometown and with whom he grew up playing and discovering music together. The album is dedicated to his grandmother and to George “Shine” Thomas, two of his earliest musical influences. His grandmother who was of East Indian heritage was always singing traditional Indian and St. Lucian folk songs. Madam Lan Gros, the third track on the album, was one of the folk songs she sang that stuck with Monty to this day. So growing up the artist was faced with a situation where inside the home he was awashed with his grandmothers singing, and outside he was inundated with the pan music of his next door neighbor, George “Shine” Thomas.
Indeed, the album is nothing less than a mapping of Monty’s musical influences and the fusing of Caribbean rhythms and St. Lucian folk with jazz and blues. It features blues (Derek’s Blues, Traffic Jam Blues), smooth contemporary jazz (Don’t Stop This Grove, Morning Shadows), reggae with a jazz treatment (Wake Up And Live), Calypso-Jazz (Blue Soap, Little Suede Shoes, and “Shine”), and a jazz treatment of St. Lucian folk with a beguine rhythm (Madam Lan Gros). The title track is a tribute to St. Lucian pan pioneer, George “Shine” Thomas, and as elsewhere in the album, pan features prominently in the song. However, above all, “Shine” is a manifestation of a virtuoso and versatile guitarist. It exhibits traces of George Benson, West Montgomery, Lee Mack Ritenour, Grant Green, Eric Clapton, BB King, etc., yet Monty’s own blues-flavored style comes through in the guitar-blues coloring of many of the tracks.
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