Bluer Than You Think
New album by Cowboys & Frenchmen
Available October 13, 2017 on Outside in Music
Eight-city album release tour October 17-27, 2017
October 17 - An Die Musik, Baltimore, MD
October 18 - Blues Alley, Washington D.C.
October 20 - Radio Bean, Burlington, VT
October 21 - Three Heads Brewing, Rochester, NY
October 22 - Cliff Bell's, Detroit, MI
October 24 - Alphabet City, Pittsburgh, PA
October 26 - High Rock Outfitters, Lexington, NC
October 27 - Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham, NC
"[Cowboys & Frenchmen] are masters of mood and atmosphere, with the ability to coordinate colour and structure to a rare degree. Bluer Than You Think consistently reveals their exceptional versatility and resourcefulness...."
- Raul da Gama, Jazz Global Media
Following the success of their widely praised 2015 debut recording Rodeo, which JazzTimes called "innovative as well as inspiring . . . electric and emotional," Cowboys & Frenchmen were featured presenters at the 2016 North American Saxophone Alliance Conference, and guests at both the D.C. Jazz Festival and the Umbria Jazz Festival's Conad Jazz Contest. Over the two years since their debut, the band - which along with Broder and Helm includes Chris Ziemba (piano), Ethan O'Reilly (bass), and Matt Honor (drums) - has honed and solidified their vision and conceptual direction, deftly weaving ideas from a broad spectrum of influence into their sound.
"There is no one tune that encapsulates our sound, and that's what we like about the band. When looking for inspiration, we are not reaching beyond ourselves to create some sort of postmodern stylistic collage, but reaching within ourselves to access the multitudes we contain as artists and human beings," says Helm about their genre-bending aesthetic.
Each composition on Bluer Than You Think has been thoughtfully conceived and conceptualized to draw out the individual personalities within the whole of the ensemble. The album begins in a state of harmonic openness with Broder's "Wayfarer," which hovers somewhere between major and minor, the melody symbolic of a traveler wandering the world, open to its mysteries, eventually weaving itself into a dance of merging ideas and tonalities. Helm's "Beasts" is embodied by different tiny, circulating, interwoven melodies, underpinned and united by repeating rhythms and patterns like an otherworldly creature DNA.
The title track, "Bluer Than You Think," is an unusual blues with a quirky melody that starts out groovy and quickly unwinds, in a microcosm of Cowboys & Frenchmen's aesthetic: rooted in the conventional forms of jazz, but transformed beyond the boundaries of tradition. "One of my more technical goals for this band," Helm says, "is to find ways to package esoteric musical concepts in a way that is not alienating to jazz listeners. This album has quarter tones, mixed and odd meter, and some very quirky ideas about harmony, melody and form. My hope is that the listener will appreciate these aspects, because as a band we still groove, interact, and emote."
The remaining three compositions on the new album - "Clear Head" by Chris Misch-Bloxdorf (the only composition from an outside source and the result of a "composition trade" between Helm and Misch-Bloxdorf), Helm's "C&F Jam," (inspired by the dueling car stereos on the streets of NYC), and Broder's "Uncommon Sense" with a push and pull of uncommon phrase structures beneath the flowing melody - round out an album that is a veritable map of Cowboy's & Frenchmen's diverse musical palette, and a promise of this inventive quintet's musical exploration to come.
Available at iTunes, Amazon and at www.cowboysandfrenchmen.com
