While the easy groovin' revolution of smooth adult contemporary music has dominated most of the jazzy airwaves during the last couple of decades, it has been the absence of funk-injected pop jazz that has been confounding pundits, as one of the more mysterious disappearances to the charts.

While hardly in the proportion of vanishing acts by Amelia Earhart, David Copperfield, or the Cubs in a pennant race, pop jazz was often a delightful, instrumental addition to all of the vocal music spanning the radio dial. Admittedly, the Top 40 framework that allowed such seminal jazz performers as Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderly, and Young-Holt Unlimited into its ranks has undergone its own radical alteration. Yet, the plight of p-funk and acid jazz has nearly obliterated most existing traces of The Meters or Tower of Power from view. Fortunately, that hasn’t detoured the ambition of Gran Torino, a Knoxville-based nine-piece horn band that has swung past swing, scurried past ska, and been lauded as rebirthing the sonorities of funk jazz.

To some folks, that may mean a weary revisit to the dullish bubblegum jazz of Chicago. Yet, Gran Torino pack a little more bop under their belt. Take the opening “Coup D-Etat,” with its greasy backbeat and hook-heavy melody, as the front line of trumpeters Scott Pederson and Pee Jay Alexander with tenor man Jason Thompson punctuate the tune with sharp blasts that seem to rush along in their own excitement. And who could blame them? The follow-up “Phyliss” lifts the main riff from Young-Holt’s “Wade In The Water” and turns it into a bubbly funk that’s uniquely Sly Stone, Kool and The Gang and Average White Band ripped right from the ‘70s airwaves. Which may be a marketing mess for Gran Torino, who sound classic in the process, but, unfortunately, has little to do with the current state of smooth jazz. But like kindred souls Dag, they share a love for the sound of a different time and place.