Charles Lloyd Quartet: Mirror (2010)

Restraint can be more powerful than flexed muscles. This has long been the credo of saxophonist Charles Lloyd. At 72, he’s mellower than ever, yet his music manages to reach deeper. His jazz is meditative, spiritual, and in his new quartet he has found a group of like-minded individuals — pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Eric Harland. “Mirror’’ is this group’s second album but its first studio effort. For the session, Lloyd gathered a diverse group of tunes — standards, hymns, originals, and even a pop song — and made them cohere. Sometimes, as with “I Fall in Love Too Easily,’’ Lloyd feels no obligation to state the melody overtly. But sometimes, as with the Thelonious Monk ballads “Monk’s Mood’’ and “Ruby, My Dear,’’ the melody is crucial to the performance. Even when the group gets slightly funky, during “The Water Is Wide,’’ Lloyd’s tone remains soft and rounded; Moran, however, lets loose with a seriously bluesy solo. The set’s most surprising number is a cover of the Beach Boys hit “Caroline, No.’’ Lloyd and Moran alternately carry the melody, and then improvise way off it, while Harland plays skittering polyrhythms and Rogers keeps it all anchored. What’s not surprising is that a Lloyd-led group can make the song sound like a jazz standard. (~Steve Greenlee, The Boston Globe, 13 September 2010)

Tracklist:
01 - I Fall in Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne) 5:00
02 - Go Down Moses (Traditional) 5:59
03 - Desolation Sound (Charles Lloyd) 7:03
04 - La Llorona (Traditional) 5:35
05 - Caroline, No (Brian Wilson, Tony Asher) 4:02
06 - Monk's Mood (Thelonious Monk) 5:01
07 - Mirror (Charles Lloyd) 6:42
08 - Ruby, My Dear (Thelonious Monk) 5:25
09 - The Water Is Wide (Traditional) 7:19
10 - Lift Every Voice and Sing (James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson) 4:29
11 - Being and Becoming (Charles Lloyd) 7:02
12 - Tagi (Charles Lloyd) 9:17
[Total time: 72:54]
Personnel:
Charles Lloyd: tenor and alto saxophones, voice;
Jason Moran: piano;
Reuben Rogers: bass;
Eric Harland: drums.
Mirror
Hotfile / Uploading @ 320K

Paul Motian: Lost in a Dream (2010)

Once in a while, a jazz recording seems to announce itself as a "classic" from the first moment. Lost In A Dream is one such album. It documents the birth of a great new project, captured live at New York's celebrated Village Vanguard, with repertoire emphasizing Paul Motian's wonderful ballad writing. New Motian tunes are juxtaposed with older ones, and a free exploration of Irving Berlin's "Be Careful It's My Heart" completes a program distinguished by gloriously supple playing from all three participants who are in tune at a high level. Or, as the New York Times noted, reviewing the concerts from which this album was drawn: "The accumulated wisdom within the band was clear." Master drummer Motian (born 1931) is heard here with two much younger musicians: saxophonist Potter (born 1971, and with whom he shares already a long playing history), and pianist Moran (born 1975, with whom he had worked only once previously, in the context of a gig with violinist Jenny Scheinman in 2006). Motian noted Moran's particular idiosyncrasies and waited for the right context to deploy them, - he was especially taken with Moran's strong and active left hand figures which, in a trio context, could dispense with the necessity for a bassist. There is a cragginess in Jason Moran's piano playing that testifies to deep roots in Thelonious Monk, a quality that Motian - who played with Monk in the 1950s - was bound to identify with. Motian has a Monkish sense of stubborn independence: he remains the most unpredictable of drummers. In the flowing ballads of Lost In A Dream, Motian is as much a sound painter as a time-keeper. There is a lot of space in the music, used brilliantly by all three players. Chris Potter, long recognised as the one of the most outstanding saxophonists of his generation, delivers an extraordinarily inspired performance in the trio, playing with great emotional conviction. Each of the three musicians has a dedicated following. Moran's listenership has been expanded recently through much roadwork with Charles Lloyd's quartet (Lloyd's critically-hailed Rabo De Nube was Moran's ECM debut).

Tracklist:
01. Mode VI (5:09)
02. Casino (8:05)
03. Lost In A Dream (6:39)
04. Blue Midnight (6:09)
05. Be Careful It’s My Heart (2:58)
06. Birdsong (6:52)
07. Ten (4:30)
08. Drum Music (6:07)
09. Abacus (4:26)
10. Cathedral Song (6:29)
Personnel:
Chris Potter – tenor saxophone
Jason Moran – piano
Paul Motian – drums
Lost in a Dream
Hotfile / Uploading @ 320K

By Request - Jason Moran: Ten (2010)

Jason Moran & The Bandwagon Celebrate Ten Years With New Album.

In 1999, the same year that Jason Moran released his debut Soundtrack To Human Motion, the prodigy pianist and composer also joined New Directions, a band made up of young stars from the Blue Note roster that went on tour in celebration of the label's 60th anniversary. At the core of New Directions was the genesis of a rhythm section--with Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen, and drummer Nasheet Waits--that would

go on to become one of the most enduringly creative piano trios in jazz.

Ten years later, the trailblazing trio--which Moran has since dubbed The Bandwagon--headed into Avatar Studios in Manhattan to record Ten, the most assured and focused album of Moran's acclaimed career, a snapshot of a mature band with a decade of shared musical experience from which to draw. The album, Moran's first in four years, will be released on EMI's Blue Note Records.

"Ten is our first record that doesn't rely on a concept to drive it. The only concept is us as a band today," says Moran. "As our band has evolved over ten years, there's a certain ease that we now function within, an ease to let the music be. On some of my earlier recordings, I was making sure I exposed my ideas as a thinker. Now we refrain from jumping through every musical window of opportunity, but only jump through the good windows."

Befitting the man who Rolling Stone called "the most provocative thinker in current jazz," Moran draws the material for Ten from a wide variety of sources. "Blue Blocks," which opens the album with a bluesy cascade of chords, comes from Live: Time, a piece commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was inspired by the quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama. The elegiac "Feedback Pt. 2" was part of a piece commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival for which Moran drew inspiration from Jimi Hendrix's performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and used samples of the guitarist's feedback.

"RFK In The Land Of Apartheid" is the main theme from a film score that Moran composed for the documentary RFK In The Land Of Apartheid about Robert Kennedy's 1966 visit to South Africa and his famous "Ripple Of Hope" speech. "Pas De Deux" comes from Moran's first-ever dance collaboration with choreographer Alonzo King's Lines Ballet company. "Old Babies" gives us another window into one of the most profound influences on Moran these days, his twin sons Jonas and Malcolm, born in 2007.

In addition to songs by Leonard Bernstein ("Big Stuff") and minstrel pioneer Bert Williams ("Nobody"), there are also compositions by three of Moran's foremost influences: Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, and Jaki Byard. "Crepuscule With Nellie" was featured in Moran's multimedia concert event In My Mind: Monk At Town Hall, 1957. "Play To Live" is a piece Moran co-wrote with his teacher Hill, who died of lung cancer in 2007.

Tracklist:

01. Blue Blocks (4:36)

02. RFK In The Land Of Apartheid (4:10)

03. Feedback Pt. 2 (4:54)

04. Crepuscule With Nellie (5:58)

05. Study No. 6 (3:17)

06. Pas De Deux – Lines Ballet (3:31)

07. Study No. 6 (4:04)

08. Gangsterism Over 10 Years (6:56)

09. Big Stuff (5:17)

10. Play To Live (4:21)

11. The Subtle One (5:35)

12. To Bob Vatel Of Paris (6:06)

13. Old Babies (5:44)

Ten

Hotfile / Uploading / Rapidshare @ 320K

Jason Moran: Artist in Residence (2006)

The adventurous pianist, composer, and bandleader Jason Moran added guitarist Marvin Sewell to his band on 2005's Same Mother. Sewell is back and melding further with his own funky blues-based playing on Artist in Residence, which is a far-reaching jazz record combining elements of post-bop, New Orleans jazz, funk, blues and even post-20th century classical music to Moran's array of shades and colors to play with. The repetitive sampled spoken word loop by Adrian Piper which acts as the ground for both the opener "Break Down" and "Artists Ought To Be Writing" is a bit h jarring when the band lights up under her. As she chants "Break down the barriers/Break down, misunderstanding/Break down, the artworld/Break down, the artist/Break down, the general public . .," the band uses it (looped continually through the piece, even in the solos) to ground everything in a circular rhythmic principle. Just as unsettling is Alicia Hall Moran's soprano vocal in near Webern-like lieder as the introduction to "Milestone" atop Moran's lilting piano before the band kicks it in prosaically at the one-minute mark. She frames her wordless vocal just as Moran's left hand begins to spin out a melodic figure for everyone else to play around, though the entire piece sounds like an intro. Bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits earn their keep trying to ground this piece as it spirals to near and far Eastern shores. But it gets so much stranger as the improvised bass intro to "Refraction 2" begins to introduce the players almost sideways, and where melody and harmony appear almost as if by accident. Yet it's all motion, building, falling, spilling, and being contained within a harmonic grid that is nearly wide open. The breakdown theme restates itself only to become more fleshed-out as narrative essay in "Artists Ought to Be Writing," but the solo piano that follows is so speculative it never really takes off. The long-ish improvised intro that finally gels as "Rain" is the album's most exciting tune. From its cryptic, elliptical movement into a full-fledged angular yet funky post-bop tune, it is breaking apart by its end nearly 12 minutes later. People may initially have a hard time with Artist in Residence. But it moves so freely and yet so purposely that it draws the listener into its unique soundworld slowly but deliberately, and offers plenty for the effort. ”

Tracklist:
1. Break Down
2. Milestone
3. Refraction 2
4. Cradle Song
5. Artists Ought to be Writing
6. Refraction 1
7. Arizona Landscape
8. Rain
9. Lift Every Voice
10. He puts on his coat and leaves
Artist in Residence
Hotfile / Uploading @ flac