Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis (May 13, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Amaryllis is a six-song suite performed by a newly formed sextet of master improvisers, including Halvorson, Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). The Mivos String Quartet joins for three of the songs, making this the largest ensemble for which Halvorson has written to date. The suite showcases Halvorson’s many musical influences from jazz, experimental, new music, and beyond.

1. Night Shift

2. Anesthesia

3. Amaryllis

4. Side Effect

5. Hoodwink

6. 892 Teeth

PRE-ORDER

Kevin Sun - 3 Bird (endectomorph music)

<3 BIRD is Kevin Sun’s love letter to the towering father of modern jazz, Charlie Parker. In a concise but wide-ranging program of 12 original compositions and three arrangements, Sun draws electrifying and futuristic conclusions from Parker’s musical innovations.

With <3 BIRD, Sun proves himself a formidable contributor to the continuing legacy of Parker’s music in this new century. In doing so, he also shares his vision for future directions in jazz and even more creative work to come.

"An outstanding recording...The album acknowledges the past, lives in the present and looks to the future... The spirit of Charlie Parker is very much alive on this one, an album that seems to bring new discoveries with every listen. Highly recommended.”

– Miguel Zenón, saxophonist/composer

★★★★☆

— DownBeat Magazine (December 2021)

"...an engaging, delightful excursion into Birdology"

– Hot House Jazz Guide

"Of all the centennial tributes to Charlie Parker that did or did not happen, I can’t think of one that honors the protean and soaring spirit of Charlie Parker more appropriately than Kevin Sun’s does here"

— Let's Call This

"...tremendous compositional acuity and flawless execution."

— JazzTrail

“...radically inventive original compositions inspired by Charlie Parker.”

— Jazziz

"..utterly brilliant."

– Art Music Lounge

"...Birding it up all so ingeniously."

— Marlbank

"Finally, a jazz tribute album that doesn't try to put arms on the Venus de Milo."

– Jay Harvey Upstage

"It is clear Sun has spent some serious time thinking about his approach to Parker’s work."

— London Jazz News

"...Sun captures the spirit of Charlie Parker so much so that young hipsters won't know the originals from the covers."

– Midwest Record

"However you categorize it, though, this is classy music."

– Music Street Journal

"...ένα πολύ μελετημένο άλμπουμ σύγχρονης και απαιτητικής jazz"

– Vinyl Mine

"...alle Bebop-beschlagen, eloquent und mit einer modernen, ebenmässig glatten Coolness."

– Jazz'N'More

"...det tok kun kort tid å skjønne at Sun hadde gått inn i Charlie Parkers univers på et helt spesielt vis og tatt det videre slik utvilsomt Bird ville satt pris på."

– Nettavisen

"...det hele er bare deilig!"

– salt peanuts*

1. Greenlit 04:16 video

2. Adroitness, Part I 01:22

3. Adroitness, Part II 02:41

4. Composite 01:36

5. Onomatopoeia 03:49

6. Dovetail 07:02

7. Cheroot 02:13

8. Du Yi's Choir 05:24

9. Big Foot 04:41

10. Sturgis 01:42

11. Schaaple (Intro) 00:44

12. Schaaple from the Appel 04:30

13. Salt Peanuts 03:50

14. Arc's Peel 01:00

15. Talck-overseed-nete (Klact-oveereds-tene) 04:07

Kevin Sun ⋅ tenor saxophone & clarinet*

Adam O’Farrill ⋅ trumpet (1, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Max Light ⋅ guitar (5, 8, 15)

Christian Li ⋅ piano & Fender Rhodes (2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13)

Walter Stinson ⋅ double bass

Matt Honor ⋅ drums

*sheng on “Du Yi’s Choir” only

Recorded by Aaron Nevezie at The Bunker Studio, Brooklyn, NY on February 26 & 27, 2021 ⋅ Mixed by Juanma Trujillo ⋅ Mastered by Eivind Opsvik at Greenwood Underground ⋅ Produced by Kevin Sun ⋅ Art direction and photography by Kevin Sun ⋅ Layout and additional photography by Diane Zhou

All songs composed by Kevin Sun (The Kevin Sun Music / ASCAP) except the following, arranged by Sun:

“Big Foot” and “Klacto-veereds-tene,” composed by Charlie Parker

“Salt Peanuts,” co-composed by Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke

PRE ORDER

NEW RELEASE: Gabriel Zucker's LEFTOVER BEATS FROM THE EDGES OF TIME is due out September 24, 2021 via ESP-Disk’

Gabriel Zucker presents Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time, a new album with The Delegation, out September 24, 2021

“Zucker creates a compelling, mysterious world that is as beautiful as it is elusive…” 

— All About Jazz

Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time, the latest release from polymath and musical maximalist Gabriel Zucker, is a sprawling and ambitious achievement. Five years in the making, the 90-minute record defies categorization or synopsis, featuring complex mixed-meter jazz, virtuosic chamber music, electronic soundscapes, and indie art rock — performed with emotion and urgency by Zucker’s virtuoso large ensemble The Delegation. Leftover Beats From The Edges Of Time will be available on September 24, 2021 on ESP-Disk’. An album release show will take place at Roulette, located at 509 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, on Tuesday, October 5th at 8:00 PM.

Despite its stylistic variety, Leftover Beats musically coheres as a single, carefully crafted composition, portions of which were premiered at Carnegie Hall and Roulette in 2017 and 2019. Written primarily between 2015 and 2018, during several stints Zucker spent living and performing in England and throughout Europe, the record reckons with time, and with the competing impulses of a backwards-looking nostalgia and a forwards-looking futurist belief in progress. “It’s something Americans have been talking about for generations, but the age and gravity of the so-called Old World is always so striking and so palpable,” says Zucker. “As a New Yorker, you find yourself among these ancient buildings in the old capitals of Europe, struck by their beauty, and yet always missing New York’s dynamism.”

“Zucker’s advanced compositional work is knotty, unpredictable, and utterly satisfying.” 

— JazzTrail

Zucker’s classical training shines as he effortlessly recycles six primary leitmotifs in seemingly endless permutations. Just moments after we first hear the titular ‘Leftover Beats’ melody in the first movement, “Requiem I: Leftover Beats,” it shows up again as a fragmented, perpetual-motion texture in the horns in “Such Closer I” — a sign of the iterations to come. Each movement is a collage of half-familiar characters, in ceaseless organic development.

The work is split into four sections of three movements each. The section names — “Past,” “Autumn 2016,” “Present,” “Future” — tell us we are moving forward in time, but the eclectic journey is anything but linear or predictable. The “Past” is manic and alive, culminating in the contrapuntal chamber-music romanticism of “How To Keep, Forever.” “Autumn 2016” opens with “Someone to Watch You,” which reaches its grand climax in a cycle of irrational meters that the band renders warm and sweet. But the section focuses mainly on November. “This notion that progress isn’t linear and forwards motion can be illusory played out so blatantly and painfully on November 8 — right as I was in the middle of composing,” Zucker says. The night of the election is grotesquely illustrated at the end of the record’s sixth track, “Confidence White.”

The “Present” that comes next feels subdued and chastened in its aftermath, with the James-Blake-inflected synth pop of “Songbird” and the hyper-produced prog jazz stylings of “Shallow Times.” And the “Future” is a dreamscape of synthesizer and sound collage nightmares punctuated by a Mahler-esque climax in “Requiem III,” before we close on Zucker’s solo piano in “How to Know, Forever,” drifting off into the sands of time.

Part of the structural conflict of Leftover Beats is built on a dialogue between two different ensembles: Several movements are performed by a chamber ensemble of Zucker, Mariel Roberts (cello), Joanna Mattrey (viola), Kate Gentile (drums), Yuma Uesaka (clarinet), and Nolan Tsang (trumpet), while the rest feature a larger ensemble of horns, rhythm section, and voices. More firmly rooted in jazz, this latter ensemble prominently features the playing of Adam O’Farrill on trumpet and Anna Webber on tenor saxophone.

Photo of Gabriel Zucker by Michael Yu

“Piano firebrand.” 

— Brooklyn Rail

The live bands were tracked in 2017 and 2019, but Zucker didn’t fully return to the recordings until the pandemic year, which he spent living nomadically in the desert of New Mexico. Far from other musicians and from the city, he turned to the tools at hand, weaving a dizzying array of synthesizers, samples, field recordings, and effects over the raw performances — disorienting waves of sound that constantly threaten to and sometimes entirely overwhelm the instrumentalists and singers. Many artists have Zucker’s skill and creativity as composers, performers, or producers — but few have such simultaneous ambition in all three.

Yet through all of the grandiose themes and overwhelming sounds, Leftover Beats is intensely personal and vulnerable — a record of confessional songs. Zucker’s rich and nuanced lyrics range from the esoteric to the direct, circling around short, emotional, aphoristic appeals repeated like mantras. The record’s first half features the effortless and beautiful vocals of Artemisz Polonyi and Lorena Del Mar, but as the album progresses the lyrics are increasingly sung by Zucker himself, in an intimate baritone over the chaos.

Leftover Beats is the second studio album with The Delegation, and Zucker’s fifth overall. It follows 2016’s Evergreen (Canceled World) with the same ensemble, which received 4.5 stars in Downbeat; 2018’s Weighting with a riveting quartet featuring Tyshawn Sorey, which won Best Debut in the New York City Jazz Record and 4.5 stars in All About Jazz; and two records with indie art rock band underorder, in 2017 and 2020.

PREORDER

Kevin Sun - 3 Bird (August 2021 endectomorph music)

<3 BIRD is Kevin Sun’s love letter to the towering father of modern jazz, Charlie Parker. In a concise but wide-ranging program of 12 original compositions and three arrangements, Sun draws electrifying and futuristic conclusions from Parker’s musical innovations.

With <3 BIRD, Sun proves himself a formidable contributor to the continuing legacy of Parker’s music in this new century. In doing so, he also shares his vision for future directions in jazz and even more creative work to come. 

1. Greenlit 04:16

2. Adroitness, Part I 01:22

3. Adroitness, Part II 02:41

4. Composite 01:36

5. Onomatopoeia 03:49

6. Dovetail 07:02

7. Cheroot 02:13

8. Du Yi's Choir 05:24

9. Big Foot 04:41

10. Sturgis 01:42

11. Schaaple (Intro) 00:44

12. Schaaple from the Appel 04:30

13. Salt Peanuts 03:50

14. Arc's Peel 01:00

15. Talck-overseed-nete (Klact-oveereds-tene) 04:07

Kevin Sun ⋅ tenor saxophone & clarinet*

Adam O’Farrill ⋅ trumpet (1, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Max Light ⋅ guitar (5, 8, 15)

Christian Li ⋅ piano & Fender Rhodes (2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 13)

Walter Stinson ⋅ double bass

Matt Honor ⋅ drums

*sheng on “Du Yi’s Choir” only

All songs composed by Kevin Sun (The Kevin Sun Music / ASCAP) except the following, arranged by Sun:

“Big Foot” and “Klacto-veereds-tene,” composed by Charlie Parker

“Salt Peanuts,” co-composed by Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke

Recorded by Aaron Nevezie at The Bunker Studio, Brooklyn, NY on February 26 & 27, 2021

Mixed by Juanma Trujillo

Mastered by Eivind Opsvik at Greenwood Underground

Produced by Kevin Sun

Art direction and photography by Kevin Sun

Layout and additional photography by Diane Zhou

PREORDER

Olli Hirvonen - New Helsinki (EDITION RECORDS 2017)

Olli Hirvonen is a dynamic and virtuosic Finnish-born, New York based guitarist. Winner of the Socar Montreux Jazz Electric Guitar competition in 2016 (the jury was presided over by John McLaughlin), Olli releases his second album, New Helsinki on Edition Records. New Helsinki is an album that promises to ignite the attention of the international media and fans worldwide with its deft infectious melodies, irresistibly bold grooves and intense inventive soloing. A musician with a larger vision and a commanding spirit, Olli Hirvonen, is a supremely gifted guitarist and composer. With New Helsinki Hirvonen has thrown down his calling card and demonstrated the promise that will inevitably thrust his career and profile in an upward trajectory towards international acclaim.

Born in Finland, in 1989, Olli Hirvonen moved to New York in 2011 to study at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. As Olli explains:

I wanted to live in NYC  since I started to practice jazz seriously. I knew that this was a place where the “tradition” of it is still breathing and evolving, instead of it being just a piece of history…Moving to NYC felt very natural. It’s definitely a very difficult city to live in (ask any musician and they’ll tell you that!)…but people here are willing to make sacrifices, and reject a comfortable life for the pursuit of something else: improvement of their expression, and knowledge of the music. This struggle connects all the musicians here, and makes the community here unique…

On comparing the Helsinki scene with New York, Olli explains: I think the special thing about working as a musician in NYC is that I can play so many more gigs …there’s a no better way to “pay your dues” like playing jazz four hours a night four times a week for some years, which I have definitely done. ..”

New Helsinki presents seven original compositions by Hirvonen. The intense and vibrant opener  ‘Arps’, clearly sets the scene for what’s to come.  Musically, he’s woven influences from all areas he’s been exposed to. ‘Before getting serious about jazz, I was totally into rock and metal, My Finnish background is definitely an important part of my music, but as jazz is definitely black American music, I would never want to avoid the core elements that make it what it is, it’s language, rhythm, and improvisation’.

New Helsinki is a bold and ambitious album with a clear statement of  intent. One thing is for sure, a new and important artist has arrived on the international scene and one to watch from both sides of the Atlantic.

1 Arps 4.08

2 Gravity 10.29

3 Invisible 11.47

4 Fundamental 6.12

5 N.E.B 4.09

6 Absolute 11.55

7 Lavola 6.50

Olli Hirvonen guitar

Walter Smith III tenor saxophone

Adam O’Farrill trumpet

Luke Marantz piano & rhodes

Marty Kenney bass

Nathan Ellman-Bell drums 

All music by Olli Hirvonen