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Michael Thomas, Obed Calvaire, Manuel Valera, Matt Brewer – The Illusion Of Choice (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:23 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Criss Cross Jazz
“This was a dream band to write for and play with,” alto saxophonist Michael Thomas says of Manuel Valera, Matt Brewer and Obed Calvaire, his A-list rhythm section on Illusion of Choice, his Criss Cross debut, and fourth leader album. “These musicians can play any style and sound like it’s the only thing they play. I wanted to explore these different areas and cohere them into an album, not sound like tunes stuck together for a CD. Everything was on the table. I wasn’t afraid to develop whatever ideas I came up with, and see where they went.”
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Lage Lund with Sullivan Fortner, Matt Brewer & Tyshawn Sorey – Most Peculiar (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:43 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Criss Cross Jazz
The back story for Lage Lund’s sixth Criss Cross recording dates to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Lund – a native of Skien, Norway who’d lived in the U.S. since 1995 – had just returned to his homeland with his wife and two daughters. With school on hiatus, the family had to improvise an at-home curriculum. “My wife and I made it up on the fly,” Lund recalls three years later. “One day the theme was learning about elephants, another day it was ‘Ancient Egypt’ – completely random.” In conjunction with these lessons, Lund established a daily ritual whereby he spent an hour or so writing a tune based on the theme du jour, another hour to 90 minutes recording it, and another two hours creating and editing a one-minute video – the better to fit within Instagram guidelines – from public domain GIFs. Over the course of five or six weeks, Lund created a playlist of 36 videos, which he uploaded to YouTube.
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Matt Brewer – Ganymede (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:23 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Criss Cross
Matt Brewer’s third Criss Cross leader album, Ganymede, follows a pair of inspired ensemble recordings (Mythology. Criss 1373; Unspoken, Criss 1390), for which the master bassist convened some of the most accomplished individualists of 21st century jazz to interpret original music that showcased Brewer’s sophisticated compositional skills, lyric gifts, and state of the art chops.
Here, Brewer pares down to the trio format, allowing tenor saxophone hero Mark Shim, drum virtuoso Damion Reid and himself ample room to stretch out on challenging “inside” repertoire by Ron Carter (“R.J.”) and Joe Henderson (“Afro-Centric”), “outside” songs by Ornette Coleman (“Eos”), and Dewey Redman (“Willisee”), a complementary piece by Shim, and four of his own well-wrought originals.
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Lewis Wright, Matt Brewer & Marcus Gilmore – The Colour of Intention (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:05 minutes | 777 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
‘The colour of intention’ refers to the creative process itself: that in order to express yourself honestly in music, you have to generate clear intentions developed from thoughts and emotions which then colour the work rather than explaining every aspect of it. In the moment of performance, the goal then becomes to put all these previous investigations out of mind and exist in the present. The colour of intention is describing everything except performance; the slower processes of development, reflection and refinement and how they’ll seep, often unpredictably, into everything that ends up being realised. Working with Matt (Brewer) and Marcus (Gilmore) adds the last and most engaging dimension. How they interpret the music, interact and bring their own highly developed languages to bare, creates something that’s both a reflection of my intentions and also infinitely more sophisticated than it’s possible for me to conceive of. I think in this sense, human connection is the greatest element of what it is we do as musicians.
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