I thought that the prospect of a jazz-grunge hybrid never got far beyond the Charlie Hunter Trio's cover of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" on the 1995 album Bing! Bing! Bing! Subsequently, the trio played Lollapalooza, eventually became a quartet and moved onto other things. But the world wouldn't have to wait long. 1995 also witnessed the self- titled debut of The Grassy Knoll.

The Grassy Knoll doesn't amount to much more than Bob Green twisting the knobs, pulling the levers and orchestrating a host of instrumental talents around him. The sound is a dark soup of grungy guitar, acid jazz loops, mild turntable- work and a few inspired flights of blown horns wailing like judgment. So it's true that the Grassy Knoll is more than a jazz- grunge fusion, but the Soundgarden- esque riffage and muscled percussion dominate the sound and make the music at times a little fatheaded.

The Grassy Knoll plays like Bob Green's personal tribute album to all his musical influences: Zeppelin swings and swaggers with Funkadelic; Massacre jams with Miles; the Beastie Boys pants Kim Thayil and throw him in the swimming pool. The crowd gets a little rowdy. People are alternately screwing and throwing up in the bathroom, and the house is a mess.

But while the music is often compelling (and consistently danceable), the whole project suffers from the great flaw of acid jazz: that samples of even the greatest jazz well mixed and looped simply cannot conjure the synergy of musicians improvising together. The Grassy Knoll clings to the notion of the jam session as the model for its sound, and therefore, the music smacks of artifice. Green's later work, particularly on III, thankfully abandoned this model and opted for a stormy electronic pastiche that made no attempt to veil the seams and edits.

We have the luxury of hearing The Grassy Knoll in context, and it stands as an admirable time capsule of the state of American music in the 1990s. But Beck has shown that diversity of influence must be married to a certain compositional genius, or else heterogeneity is allowed to take the place of craft. Later albums will prove this lesson learned. But don't think that The Grassy Knoll doesn't kick a couple of asses along its groovy way, it's just that those asses have been kicked before, by bigger and tougher cats than Bob Green.

-Brent S. Sirota