" data-original-title="" title="">Matt Savage, a young man who knows his way around a keyboard (a child prodigy, he recorded his first album, Live at the Olde Mill, when he was barely nine years old), has added a new twist, namely soul / funk, to Splash Variations, the thirteenth recording under his name and first as leader of the Matt Savage Groove Experiment. Variations, which comprises half a dozen songs (five written by Savage) and runs for thirty-eight minutes, is labeled an EP (or what was known as an LP in the long-ago era of needles on vinyl).

Savage's remarkable back-story has become rather well-known by now: diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder (a form of autism) at age three, taught himself to read music and play the piano at age six, was in a recording studio within three years, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now a grizzled twenty-six-year-old maven, Savage has earned degrees from the New England Conservatory and Berklee College of Music in Boston and put them to use as a composer / arranger while touring the world as an in-demand soloist.

Always looking for new challenges, Savage expanded his core trio to form the six-member (plus vocalist) Groove Experiment and add variety and color to his music. On Splash Variations, Savage has chosen to open with one of the more exquisite love songs ever written, Jerome Kern / Oscar Hammerstein II's "All the Things You Are." Not a bad choice, one might assume. Unfortunately, in this case, the song's lovely sentiments are ill-treated by the humdrum rhythm, even more so by