"Jazz Is Dead's publicity seeks to position Los Angeles' Katalyst, who backed up Bartz and Roy Ayers on their Jazz Is Dead albums and who sound like a fun live band (check the YouTube below), as inheritors of the spiritual jazz of Lonnie Liston Smith and Norman Connors. The comparison comes with a downside. While Smith and Connors came of age in Pharoah Sanders' boundary-stretching bands of the early 1970s, both left to pursue more saleable variations, the jazz equivalent of contemporaneous Southern Californian yacht rock. To be fair, 13 gets deeper as it progresses, and "Summer Solstice," "Juneteenth" and "Dogon Cypher" are solid. There is no risk taking to speak of, and (it sounds like) more overdubbing than you could shake a stick at, but there is energy and a good vibe. Like the fabled curate's egg, the album is excellent in parts".