| Jazz Fusion |
From the opening bars of The Outernet, you know exactly where you are. The terrain feels familiar, almost reassuring, particularly for anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of Jaco Pastorius’s fretless swagger or the polyrhythmic architectures of Weather Report. This is music that wears its lineage openly. The first track seems designed as a declaration of allegiance: a manifesto of progressive jazz intent. But it’s only with the second tune that the band’s true identity begins to surface. That’s when The Outlet stops quoting its heroes and starts conversing with them. The result is a sound that feels like the offspring of Uzeb and Weather Report, a sleek hybrid born somewhere between Montreal and Miami, between analog warmth and digital precision.
From the start, The Outlet makes no secret of its affection for the golden age of fusion, those years between the late 1980s and early 1990s when instrumental virtuosity met pop polish and studio innovation. Even the sonic palette, the crisp drums, the layered synths, the guitar tone shimmering with chorus, seems calibrated to reawaken a collective memory. Listening feels like stepping into a time capsule, one lined with fluorescent lights and racks of gleaming hardware. The sensation is a little uncanny, like recognizing a place you’ve never been but somehow remember. Yet that nostalgic undercurrent is precisely what gives The Outlet its particular charm: the sense of reviving a musical language that once believed the future could be both complex and danceable.
At the center of this revival stands Phil Turcio, pianist, producer, and something of a quiet architect. Turcio’s musical journey began in his adolescence, when curiosity and discipline fused into a creative reflex. Today, his compositions arrive almost unbidden, as if summoned from some parallel frequency. He has described melodies appearing in his mind and finding their way to completion within hours, a process that borders on the mystical. Technology, in his hands, becomes less a tool than a conduit, a way to capture the immediacy of inspiration before it dissolves. That rapid-fire intuition leaves a distinct imprint on The Outernet: even at its most polished, the music carries the spark of improvisation, the sense that ideas are still in motion.
But this first album is also, unmistakably, a debut. It’s exuberant, demonstrative, eager to impress. You can hear the players testing the boundaries of their own abilities, sometimes layering brilliance upon brilliance until the compositions feel almost overbuilt. There are moments of undeniable beauty, yet the emotional core occasionally gets lost amid the virtuosity. The band stands, at least for now, between two worlds: progressive rock and progressive jazz, head and heart, technique and transcendence. That tension can be thrilling, or exhausting, depending on your tolerance for density.
The project itself traces back to pre-pandemic brainstorming sessions, the kind of open-ended conversations that musicians hold when the world still feels wide open. Out of those exchanges came the idea for The Outlet: not just a band but an ecosystem of sound, a collaborative space resilient enough to withstand the upheavals that soon followed. When the quartet finally performed together, the chemistry was immediate. The Outernet emerged as the document of that connection, a debut not born of convenience but of persistence. “More than a group,” as one observer noted, “they’re a convergence of endurance and intent.”
Live, that endurance translates into energy. On stage, The Outlet plays with the focus of craftsmen and the force of believers. Every arrangement seems built for impact, lean, efficient, designed to communicate directly with an audience. Yet for all that precision, what’s missing, at times, is poetry. There’s room here for a broader emotional vocabulary, for silences that breathe, for harmonic detours that surprise. The guitar, with its Van Halen-like flash, can dazzle but also dominate; one wishes it would occasionally yield to something softer, more ambiguous. Still, the promise is unmistakable. The players are already formidable; what they need is time, time to distill influence into identity, homage into authorship.
In the end, The Outernet feels like a bridge, between eras, between ideals of what jazz fusion once was and what it might still become. It’s an album that reminds us how powerfully sound can conjure memory, and how memory, in turn, can propel invention. If the record sometimes feels too tight, too eager to impress, it’s the impatience of musicians who know exactly what they’re capable of but are still discovering how best to say it. For now, The Outlet may shine brightest on stage, where its intensity breathes freely. But given the ambition evident here, that balance between nostalgia and novelty, between revival and reinvention, won’t stay unresolved for long.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 23rd 2025
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Musicians :
Phil Turcio: Keyboardist, composer, and the band’s leader. He also produced the album.
Emilio Kormanic: Guitarist
Pete Mollica: Bassist
Pete Drummond: Drummer
Track listing:
The Fury
The Crossing pt I
The Crossing pt II
Mortal
Menacing Images
We Remember
Running From The Aliens pt I
Running From The Aliens pt II