Haeun Joo - We Will Find (August 2021)

The eight tracks that make up We Will Find represent the first complete set of original statements from Joo committed to disc. Recorded in two sessions in 2019, the album is a carefully arranged selection of original compositions that stand as strongly as an overall artistic statement as they do a selection of individual tunes. There’s a calm assurance to both Joo’s playing and her compositions, which are lyrical and accessible but never without sparky musical intuition.

1. 86 04:14

2. John 04:39

3. We Will Find 05:24

4. Thursday 04:01

5. In The Rain 03:36

6. Questions 05:13

7. A Window In The Dark 03:27

8. Eternal Love 05:48

Haeun Joo - Piano, Voice

Matt Holman - Trumpet, Flugelhorn

Doug Weiss - Bass

Ronen Itzik - Drums

Produced by Vadim Neselovskyi

Recording / Mixing : Michael Brorby

Mastering : Peter Karl

Photography : Bill Douthart, William Oh

Album Artwork : Sukbum Kim

PRE-ORDER

Yuhan Su - City Animals (SUNNYSIDE RECORDS October 26, 2018)

New York City can be like a jungle. With a menagerie of people intermingling in seemingly never ceasing action, the City has ecosystems within ecosystems. Vibraphonist/composer Yuhan Su has been inspired by her chaotic new home and her experiences with the individuals she has met there. Her new recording, City Animals, captures her enthusiasm for the craziness of the City and the adventures she has had since her arrival. 

Originally from Taiwan, Su came to the States in 2008 to further her music studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she expanded her classical percussion knowledge to the world of jazz and improvisation. In 2012, Su moved to New York; she fell in love with the City and immediately immersed herself in the wilds of the jazz scene. 

Su began to check out the local musicians in an effort to create her own ensemble. She started writing music for a quintet of trumpet, guitar, bass, vibes and drums, which was able to record an album and tour, including a visit to her native Taiwan. As her compositional style evolved, Su wished to both open the sound and to have more harmonic control of the group through her vibes. So she recruited saxophonist Alex LoRe to replace the guitar and join the tightly knit ensemble, which features trumpeter Matt Holman, bassist Petros Klampanis and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell. 

Her decision to have the vibes as the only harmonic instrument freed up the group’s sound, enabling a stripping down to single voices or a wide harmonic spectrum. Su’s music continues to blend elements of modern jazz and contemporary classical into a texturally rich and dynamic fusion, while always maintaining a groove. Having wanted to be a novelist as a child, Su is a natural storyteller who uses words to remember feelings that will drive compositions inspired by experiences and stories that she has grown fond of. 

The program begins with “Y El Coche Se Murió,” a dramatic piece that interprets Su’s nerves when her band’s van broke down en route to a gig in Spain, the van’s pace echoed by an insistent pulse that dies out leaving the musicians to their own devices. Echoing the optimism and wariness of the immigrant experience, “Viaje” is written in two parts, dark and disjointed leading to bright and optimistic. Su has had an increasing interest in dance, which led her to write “Feet Dance,” a bounding aural study of dancers’ feet as they move. 

As a vibraphonist, Su is a harmonic instrument player, so pianists are obvious inspirations. “Poncho Song” captures her appreciation for the approach of piano legend Bill Evans. The title track is about the noisy yet grooving experience of living in New York, with the band dancing around the groove and rich harmony. 

Su wrote the Kuafu Suite using the Chinese folk tale about a giant who chases the sun only to exhaust himself, try to revive himself by drinking a lake and, finally, dying with his goal unrealized, thus creating mountains and valleys. Seen by many as a warning of overestimating oneself, Su’s fascination with the story led to her romantic take of running towards your goals. Three parts, “I. Rising,” “II. Starry, Starry Night,” and “III. Parallel Chasing,” follow the giant’s journey in a wonderfully expressive musical narrative. 

The beautiful ballad “Tutu & D” is inspired by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama’s The Book of Joy, which tells readers to find happiness, which for Su is finding beauty in music. The raucous “Party 2AM” looks to a more inebriated style of merriment, with the ensemble playing rambunctiously against one another. 

Yuhan Su looks to find the joy in the hectic life she has chosen in the jungle that is New York City. Her City Animals is a deft and uplifting journey that will separate the young vibist from the herd. 

Yuhan Su - vibraphone

Matt Holman - trumpet, flugelhorn

Alex LoRe - alto saxophone

Petros Klampanis - bass

Nathan Ellman-Bell - drums

1. Y El Coche Se Murió

2. Viaje

3. Feet Dance

4. Poncho Song

5. City Animals

6. KuaFu (I. Rising)

7. KuaFu (II. Starry, Starry Night)

8. KuaFu (III. Parallel Chasing)

9. Tutu & D

10. Party 2AM

Matt Holman - The Tenth Muse (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS 2017)

Trumpeter and composer Matt Holman releases a recording of his large scale composition The Tenth Muse, written for his ensemble (trumpet, vibraphone, piano, woodwinds) of the same name. Holman seemlessly weaves together improvisational and through-composed elements in the work, looking to the romantic poems of Greek poet Sappho in translations by Anne Carson as a source of inspiration and direct material. 

In the ancient love poetry of the Greek lyrist Sappho, trumpet player/composer Matt Holman has found a trove of writings whose emotions and sentiments feel as timely and passionate today as they did when they were written, more than 2,500 years ago. On his new album, The Tenth Muse, Holman bridges the ancient with the modern through 16 ethereal compositions inspired by Sappho’s writings (as translated by Anne Carson).

Holman’s pieces take the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s poetry as it has come down to us as a guide for balancing structure and improvisation, clarity and mystery. Holman’s stark but enticing music is brought to life by a gifted quartet well versed in exploring heady concepts with impassioned vigor and airy sensitivity: Holman, saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist Sam Sadigursky, vibraphonist Chris Dingman, and pianist Bobby Avey. Holman initially discovered Sappho’s poetry through his wife, who introduced him to the Greek poetess during the early days of their courtship, the intoxicating period when every aspect of taste and personality is a new discovery. The words that survived from antiquity seemed to reflect his own feelings across a gulf-spanning millennia, while the significant portions that had been lost over time added a sense of entrancing uncertainty.

“I was astounded at the beauty of these fragments,” he recalls. “What exists today is so minimal that the spaces between the words prompt the brain to fill in words and phrases, almost like erasure poetry. Looking at Sappho’s work and finding these beautiful poems, I almost ache on some of them wanting to know what those words were that we’ll never know. For me that was really powerful.”It also resonated with Holman’s instincts as a composer/improviser, whose own muse subsists on the relationship between the written and the spaces left open for spontaneous invention.

To further distance the compositions from his own instincts, Holman devised different systems of cryptograms for each piece – pitches and rhythms associated with specific letters or words (the best known example being J.S. Bach’s coding of his own name into compositions using notes associated with its four letters). “You have a certain language and certain licks that are characteristically you, which is a good thing, but when you’re trying to create something new you want to start fresh, ”Holman explains. “I wanted to have another element outside of my own tendencies. You have to search really hard to find it, almost like it’s the composer’s secret, but I think it adds more depth.

”The music for The Tenth Muse (the title comes from Plato’s adulatory name for the poetess) was written during a residency at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming in August 2013. He spent the month working in a refurbished schoolhouse dating from the early 20th century on a scenic 30,000-acre ranch offering outdoor activities and teeming with wildlife. “I had an incredible piano and nature right outside my door,” Holman describes. “Deer would walk by all the time. There was time and there was a vastness to being in Wyoming that allowed a real focus of purpose and connection to nature, a quality that is present in Sappho’s work. All of these poems come from an individual voice, so I strove to capture in the music this sense of solitude. I wanted the music to sound intimate, as if it came from a single individual even if there are moments where it’s multidimensional.”The Tenth Muse premiered at Dave Douglas’ FONT (Festival of New Trumpet Music) in September 2013. The music is remarkable for its intimacy and fluidity, sliding effortlessly between the composed and the improvised with grace and elegance, though not without a full-blooded urgency.

The unusual instrumentation provides an expansive palette, which Holman seizes on in a variety of ways. His trumpet and Sadigursky’s woodwinds are supple and soaring, tethered by the resonant power of Avey’s piano and softened by the gauzy luminescence of Dingman’s vibes. “I sought to evoke the full range of themes in these fragments,” Holman says. “Some are passionate and devotional, related to love, and others reflect on the awe-inspiring aspects of nature or the power of dreams. Over the course of two millenia, the human condition has remained fundamentally the same. We are still beholden to our desires, still marvel at a vast sky, still suffer over love both in its anticipation and in its loss.

In this day and age, we are inundated with images and reminders of what divides us from each other. Sappho’s poetry draws for us the connection between the ancient and the modern, reminding us that even something as simple as a fragment can speak to the depths of our shared humanity.

01. fragment 104b 6:49

02. fragment 147 7:20

03. fragment 24a,c,d 5:11

04. fragment 120 2:01

05. fragment 36 5:16

06. fragment 29a 3:43

07. fragment 67a 1:50

08. fragment 168b 2:10

09. fragment 4 7:57

10. fragment 34 1:36

11. fragment 38 6:11

12. fragment 32 3:14

13. fragment 18 1:04

14. fragment 26 3:31

15. fragment 63 3:41

16. fragment 88a,b 5:04

Matt Holman: trumpet, flugelhorn, compositions

Chris Dingman: vibraphone

Bobby Avey: piano

Sam Sadigursky: soprano sax, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto flute, flute