Red Warrior is very different from Ronald Shannon Jackson’s 1980’s Decoding Society albums. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of taste, but it is fascinating at least. The thing happening here is a very creative arrangement. Jackson is the ringleader of a wild circus. On several Decoding Society albums, Jackson would employ two bassists— usually Melvin Gibbs and Bruce Johnson. Here, the band is Jackson, plus two bassists and three guitarists. No Decoding Society holdovers, but it’s just a different thing. Jef Lee Johnson, Stevie Salas and Jack Desalvo on guitar, and Ramon Pooser and Conrad Mathieu on bass. With this kind of a group, there are two tricks. First, they need to not step on each others’ lines. That’s up to Jackson, as bandleader, but at this point, he was an experienced master at that. What mattered after that was for each player to ensure that he distinguished himself. With three guitars, in particular, what happens when you go from one guitarist to the next? Realistically, these are not marquee names with styles identifiable to the typical listener, but the listener needs to be able to say, wow, that first and second solo were played so differently!And that happens. That’s what makes it all work, along with Jackson’s arrangements, of course.So as an album, this is a hard-rocking affair. About as hard-rocking as anything else Jackson has ever done. Still identifiable as jazz, but much more fusion than Ornette’s free-funk. This 1990 album was recorded just as the jam band revival was getting started, and one could easily imagine a HORDE stage making a welcome home for Jackson playing this kind of music, certainly more than his more Ornette-oriented music. The music is not precisely linear, but neither is it especially abstract. Certainly the acid jazz movement, which caught on a few years later, was at least as abstract as Red Warrior, and the acid jazz groups found themselves overlapping with the jam bands of the era. Red Warrior, though, is the kind of album that one can imagine Jimmy Herring or some of the other jazz-oriented players on that scene hearing, and thinking, wow, this guy gets it. And with such an original, distinctive arrangement allowing the interplay of all the strings, there is something special and unique here.To be sure, Red Warrior will not appeal to every Jackson fan, nor every jazz fan. The absence of horns— Zane Massey in particular— creates a different sound, and a different aesthetic. That is part of what pulls the music more toward rock and away from jazz, or at least, away from free jazz. Yet were Jackson to play the same kind of thing over and over again, he’d get bored, and the music would suffer. So Red Warrior serves many purposes, and really, there are some blistering solos here from players that many fans probably don’t know. That’s both a shame and a testament to how many amazingly skilled instrumentalists there are, making their way in the world. Give it a listen. It isn’t really a Decoding Society album, but it is quite cool nonetheless.