Phoenix Best Music Poll Winners 2000

It’s easy to think of the Fully Celebrated as upstarts, but in fact they’ve been around for a decade - first as a trio, then in the past couple of years as a quartet, since the fine young trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum joined Jim Hobbs in the front line. The FCOs first gained notoriety in the rock clubs - or, at least, it was the rock crowd that first created the buzz. Maybe that’s because the band are proponents of old-fashioned avant-garde inclusiveness: funk, Latin, blues, Balkan, and any number of “world” melodies, scales, and rhythms show up in the FCO book, with plenty of free-jazz-collective chatter. The rock crowd has been as receptive as any to “extreme” jazz, and it doesn’t hurt that the quartet can lay an out-there squall of horns over a very deep groove (carved by bassist Timo Shanko and drummer Django Carranza). Other reference points are Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Thomas Chapin, but the band’s personality is its own - a quality that’s recorgnized at both the Middle East bakery and the Regattabar.

Jon Garelick, Best Music Poll, May 19 2000