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

Eave - Eave (ASTRAL SPIRITS 2018)

A mix of New York and Canadian players, "Eave" is the quartet of Anna Webber and Erik Hove on saxophones, Vicky Mettler on guitar and Evan Tighe on drums, a collective abstract improvising band that uses its instruments as much for effect as for conventional playing, with commanding skill in all approaches as they surprise, bemuse and mesmerize the listener.

Evan Tighe (drums). Unique and interesting playing, outstanding and innovative improvising - all these elements are heard in all four musicians musical language. Their compositions have effective and specific sound - musicians for the most of the time are improvising together. Many different playing techniques, contrasting and unique styles and manners are marvelously combined together. Free and fascinating musical experiments are mostly dedicated for sound experiments, special effects, interesting and unusual combinations of timbres, instruments, chords and other musical language elements. The improvisations by these four musicians have effective, specific, original and vibrant sound.

The compositions of this album have soft and dynamic sound. The collective improvisations are full of different playing manners, original and unpredictable stylistic waves, sudden turns of moods, contrasting characters and episodes. The main aim of these improvisations is to create and extract unusual and extraordinary sound. Musicians try to expand the technical abilities of the instruments, using innovative and experimental ways of playing and create rich and expressive musical language. The compositions have solid and vibrant melodic section and dynamic rhythmic. Along with these two elements, colorful, illustrative and effective background is also very important part of musical pattern.

Saxophones and flutes melodies are based on musical experiments - Anna Weber and Eric Hove are individual and original improvisers. Both of them have their own playing style and are using specific methods of playing. Soft, light and colorful flutes solos are effectively illustrated with unusual timbres, glissando, virtuosic passages, trills, arpeggios and many other traditiona; playing techniques. Along with these elements, both musicians masterfully connect hhuge amount of experimental ways of playing and extended playing techniques.

Soft, gentle and joyful flutes are connected with other instruments. Saxophones solos are expressive and dynamic. Loud, fast, full of trills, tremolos, wild fast and furious passages, vibrant and intense blow-outs, expressive and spontaneous solos are softly and organically connected together with abstract, subtle, silent and lyric episodes. With gentle, light and expressive flutes, spontaneous and effective saxophones solos, rich, bright and modern musical language is created. The huge amount of different playing techniques, original and innovative playing manners, inventive decisions, unusual timbres and strange noises create solid, memorable and interesting sound. Viccy Metler guitar melodies are full of different and original playing techniques - musician masterfully uses and connects together traditional and experimental playing techniques, switch between different moods, characters and ways of playing. His improvisations are free, spontaneous, based on contrasting musical patterns and forms - abstract and concrete musical patterns are gently connected together.

The improvisations have expressive and dynamic melodies, innovative improvising manner, interesting harmony, solid bass line and are effectively illustrated by strange noises and special effects. Evan Tighe drums improvisations are contained by especially huge variety of different rhythms and sounds of percussion instruments - improviser masterfully combines together static and dynamic, slow and very fast, memorable or abstract rhythms. Loud drum rolls, trills, tremolos, arepeggios and many different playing techniques create effective, dynamic and solid sound and independent rhythmical section. All improvisations have effective, bright and innovative sound.

1. Meriwether 04:25

2. Liver-Eating 05:54

3. Gold Fever 04:19

4. Axe or Chisel 07:46

5. Denver Bob 04:33

6. The Night of the Burning River 03:02

7. A Well-Worn Path 03:57

8. Owyhee 04:05

9. Yakima 06:01

10. Memorandum 04:07

Anna Webber - saxophone

Erik Hove - saxophone

Vicky Mettler - guitar

Evan Tighe - drums

Anna Webber's Simple Trio - Binary (October 25, 2016) SKIRL RECORDS

Anna Webber looks to the internet for inspiration on her new recording Binary 

Featuring the SIMPLE Trio with John Hollenbeck and Matt Mitchell

 Available October 25, 2016 on Skirl Records

CD Release Concerts  • November 3 at Sound it Out Series, Greenwich House, NYC 

• November 4 at Dimensions in Jazz, Portland, ME 

• November 5 at Lilypad Inman, Cambridge, MA

New York-based composer, saxophonist, and flutist Anna Webber, called “one of the most exciting new arrivals on the New York avant-garde jazz scene” by Peter Margasak in the Chicago Reader (2014), releases Binary with her band the SIMPLE Trio, featuring John Hollenbeck on drums and Matt Mitchell on piano.  The recording will be out October 25 on Skirl Records.

For Binary, Webber looked to the internet for inspiration. Using websites that turn words into drumbeats, YouTube test channels, and even her own IP address, she found a constant stream of inspiration for her compositions. The album’s title track was composed using numbers and letters produced by a random binary digit generator.

“Using material from a pre-defined source like the internet helps me to be more creative,” said Webber. “It keeps me from falling into routines.”

When writing the music for Binary, Webber began each piece with a small melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or purely conceptual starting point. The five “Rectangles” tracks on the album come from the YouTube test channel “WebDriver Torso,” which features ten-second videos of red and blue rectangles set to high-pitched, microtonal sounds. With a number of the pieces, she created musical plays-on-words that exude a sense of tension and release, including “Impulse Purchase,” which was written using Webber’s IP address, and “Tug o’ War,” a transliteration of the game tug of war into music. Interested in both the complex as well as the playful aspects of the internet, Webber investigated how the concept of a meme could manifest in a musical context in the aptly titled "Meme.”

Though the internet provided innumerable opportunities for compositional experimentation, the greatest excitement came from knowing that she was composing for her SIMPLE Trio bandmates Hollenbeck and Mitchell, two incredibly adept musicians who share her desire to venture into unexplored territory.


“Because we’ve been playing, touring, and recording together as a band as well as in various projects for several years now, our musical interaction since the last album has evolved considerably,” said Webber. “John and Matt are fantastic to compose for and improvise with because they have the ability to play challenging music in a way that feels relaxed and natural.”

Webber's intention in her work is to blur the line between composed and improvised material, creating frameworks for improvisation that will challenge the musicians to expand outside the realm of what they normally play. She is committed to experimenting with the jazz form, pushing her to challenge conventions as well as her own impulses as an artist. Although Webber situates herself in the jazz world, her compositional approach is as greatly influenced by jazz music as it is by new music composers such as Giacinto Scelsi, Györgi Ligeti, and Gérard Grisey. 

Binary finds the SIMPLE Trio expanding and building on what The New York Times called the “range of the group members: fulminous, intense collective improvisation” in songs that feel like living things and lead the audience in different directions on each listen. Binary is yet another example of the trio’s ability to combine “a huge sound, big ideas and disarming humor into an engagingly avant-garde approach that promises to continue to gain wider recognition,” (Style Weekly, 2016).  

Anna Webber is an integral part of a new wave of the Brooklyn avant-garde jazz scene. A saxophonist and flutist who strives for the unexpected, she has furthermore consistently proven herself to be a unique and forward-thinking composer with releases such as 2014’s SIMPLE (Skirl Records) and 2013’s Percussive Mechanics.

In addition to the SIMPLE Trio, Webber also leads the septet Percussive Mechanics with which she has released two albums on Pirouet Records: Refraction (2014) and Percussive Mechanics (2013). Webber is also featured on Dan Weiss’ album Sixteen: Drummers Suite and on an upcoming release from Jen Shyu’s band Jade Tongue. She is a member of Ohad Talmor’s Grand Ensemble; Matt Mitchell’s Sprees; Fabian Almazan’s Realm of Possibilities; the Erik Hove Chamber Ensemble; and a new sextet from Bang on a Can All-Stars member Ken Thomson; among others. She recently played in the world premiere of Sila: The Breath of the World by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Luther Adams at Lincoln Center.

In 2015, she was the recipient of a grant from the Shifting Foundation. In 2014, she won the BMI Foundation Charlie Parker Composition Prize as a member of the BMI Jazz Composers' Workshop. 

She is the winner of the 2010 Prix François-Marcaurelle at the OFF Festival of Jazz in Montreal. She has been awarded grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts and residencies from the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Webber is originally from British Columbia, Canada.

www.skirlrecords.com

www.annakristinwebber.com

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