Nearly 10 years ago, veteran sideman Michael O'Neill had the seed planted for him to become a solo artist when he was onstage at Carnegie Hall as part of a world tour with singer Rickie Lee Jones in support of her 1991 Top Pop album.
Like most guys who make a great living jamming behind bigger stars, O'Neill -whose resume boasts a few years in the 1980s with Stevie Wonder and a near-nonstop two decades with George Benson - had trouble carving out the time and space to compose and produce an album's worth of material. His muse kept pecking away at him until he felt confident and made the time. The one advantage to waiting some 20-odd years to create the appropriately titled Never Too Late (Merrimack) is the wealth of stylistic influences he's absorbed along the way.
It's easy to identify these influences on a track-by-track basis on Never Too Late. The title track - co-written with keyboardist Gregg Karukas - finds O'Neill approximating the crisp electric style of Benson - high tones flutter and dart off the main melody as wah-wah click textures call out in the background. Ditto the mid-tempo, retro-soul ballad "Winds of Summer," which opens with a brisk hook that recalls Benson's "Breezin'." Pianist Dave Witham (another vet from the Benson crew) chimes in at one point with a quick but playful solo before O'Neill digs into a solo that slowly builds steam.
O'Neill pays homage to Stevie Wonder, too, playing things fairly close to the vest on a thoughtful cover of "Visions" with vocals by Carl Anderson. "I Ain't Lyin' " dips into that Crusaders spirit, opening with a dense swirl of percussion by trapsman Land Richards and Dio Saucedo's tambourine. O'Neill then launches into a rocking electric guitar melody over the bluesy organ harmony of Chris Ho, with plenty of Wayne Henderson-like horn hits provided by Walt Fowler. Mid-tempo meditations like "Sidewalk Strut" and the Brazilian-flavored acoustic piece "Cruisin' On Down" (featuring O'Neill's lively scatting) offer more evidence of the guitarist's ability to please the listener's ear while stretching stylistic boundaries.

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