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Dave Douglas, Ian Chang, Rafiq Bhatia, James Brandon Lewis – GIFTS (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:03:40 minutes | 761 MB | Genre: Jazz, Contemporary Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Greenleaf Music
“How often do we step back and realize what a gift it is to have this music in our life?” asks acclaimed trumpeter, composer and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas. On Gifts, his newest Greenleaf project, Douglas harnesses that feeling of simple wonder with a new book of pieces and four intriguing takes on Strayhorn songs, premiering a new quartet with poll-sweeping tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and two members of the Oscar-nominated post-rock trio Son Lux: guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The sound is harmonically spacious, with no bass, but a full, sonically adventurous guitar palette from Bhatia that frames the group’s trumpet-tenor melodic concept in fresh and unexpected ways.
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Rafiq Bhatia – Breaking English (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 31:42 minutes | 371 MB | Genre: Jazz, Experimental, Instrumental
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Anti – Epitaph
Rafiq Bhatia has already proven his fondness for experimentation as a member of synth-rock trio Son Lux. But on his third solo album, Breaking English, Bhatia pushes himself even further, crafting nine instrumentals that pull from a grab bag of influences and emotions. It’s a challenging listen. “Olduvai I – Minarets” evokes the grim doom of an early Dracula film, and the icy string interlude “Olduvai II – We Are Humans, With Blood In Our Veins,” sounds like Bernard Herrmann run amok. Both songs are dense soundscapes that only make sense when considered as two halves of a whole. It isn’t just that each song covers a significantly different stretch of musical topography; throughout English, Bhatia seems explores on a single song the kind of disparate musical ideas that many artists would unpack over the course of an album. Case in point: “Hoods Up,” his tribute to Trayvon Martin which benefits from the artist’s more-is-more aesthetic, weaving together spikes-out jazz riffs, hip-hop beats, and strings. These elements fuse in the track’s noisy crescendo, which seems to suggest the hopelessness, confusion, and anger evoked by the teenager’s senseless death.
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