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

Yuma Uesaka / Cat Toren / Colin Hinton - Ocelot (2021 577 Records)

Ocelot – the new Brooklyn-based trio featuring Cat Toren, Yuma Uesaka, and Colin Hinton – presents its irresistibly vivid debut album, via 577 Records.

At a contemplative time for the world, the new Brooklyn-based trio Ocelot makes its debut on record with an album that emphasizes melody and atmosphere, whether the music is meditative or more volatile. This group features award-winning pianist Cat Toren, saxophonist/clarinetist Yuma Uesaka and drummer/percussionist Colin Hinton.

Ocelot represents the culmination of a year’s worth of composing, rehearsing, touring and local gigging for the band – including an October 2019 residency in New Haven, Connecticut, and a tour of the East Coast and Canada that deepened the trio’s chemistry and its approach to the material recorded later that month. Remarkably, Toren was pregnant with her daughter during the entire process, a challenge made easier by the keenly supportive relationships in the band. “We’re three friends who trust each other, converse easily and have tremendous respect for one another,” Toren explains. “Our relationships are the foundation for our interactive discourse, which can vary – we’ve performed concerts that were musically very patient, and we’ve played gigs at bars that were real bangers.”

1. Daimon II 02:50

2. Factum 10:38

3. Iterations I 04:44

4. Post 05:43

5. Anemone 06:31

6. Contemptuality 10:16

7. Sequestration 08:08

8. Crocus 07:14

Yuma Uesaka: tenor saxophone, clarinets (Bb, Bass, Contralto)

Cat Toren: piano, nord

Colin Hinton: drums, percussion, gongs, glockenspiel, vibraphone

Recorded October 20, 2019 at The Bunker Studio (Brooklyn, NY) by Nolan Thies, assisted by Carlos Mora

Edited by Edward Gavitt

Mixed by Eivind Opsvik (Greenwood Underground)

Mastered by Brent Lambert (Kitchen Mastering)

Pre-order

Peter Nelson - Ash, Dust and the Chalkboard Cinema (Outside In Music 2018)

Trombonist/Composer Peter Nelson Triumphs Over His Five-Year Struggle with Mysterious Chronic Pain on Stunning New Album

Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard Cinema, out August 31 on Outside In Music, features three ensembles taking listeners on a narrative journey through suffering, discovery and healing

“Peter Nelson is an exciting and creative trombonist making waves on the NYC jazz scene.  If his name is on it, you know you are getting something good! With the music world brimming with talent more than ever, Peter’s one to keep an eye on.”

– Michael Dease, award-winning trombonist and educator

“Nelson has a sweet, stutter shuttled virtuosity on his valveless instrument of mystical musical astronomers, floating on deep rhythmic currents.”

– Kitty Montgomery, Chamber Music America

With the evocatively titled Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard Cinema, trombonist/composer Peter Nelson retraces his five-year struggle with a debilitating condition that threatened to end his career as a musician just as it was entering its ascendancy. The album’s vivid compositions and enthralling playing draw the listener in to experience the grueling emotional journey that Nelson undertook, from the onset of mysterious symptoms through the isolating battle with physical and mental pain through the rigor of healing and the joy and revelation of recovery.

Due out August 31 via Outside In Music, Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard Cinema enlists three different ensembles to tell its compelling story, all featuring Nelson on trombone: an ethereal trio featuring vibraphonist Nikara Warren and the wordless vocals of Alexa Barchini; a hard-swinging quartet with pianist Willerm Delisfort, bassist Raviv Markovitz, and drummer Itay Morchi; and a brilliant septet supplementing the quartet with alto saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, trumpeter Josh Lawrence, and bass clarinetist Yuma Uesaka.

A native of Lansing, Michigan, Nelson earned his degree in Jazz Studies at Michigan State University, where he studied with heavy hitters like bassist Rodney Whitaker. After recording two albums in his home state he decided to move to Brooklyn in 2013, and soon found himself performing with longtime heroes like pianist/bandleader Orrin Evans and drummer Matt Wilson. Almost simultaneously, however, he started to develop strange symptoms while playing.

At first the issues were minor: small, localized pain and subtle feelings of anxiety. Before long, the symptoms escalated to include chronic hyperventilation, severe shortness of breath, and excruciating pain in the face down his back and arms. “Here I was playing with a lot of my heroes, in musical settings that I’d dreamed about and I spent a lot of time trying to cultivate,” Nelson recalls. “And it became very difficult to be on the bandstand while at the same time fighting my horn and fighting my body. It felt like a physically violent way of losing my medium for relating to the world, and was emotionally and spiritually crippling.”

Nelson sought the help of innumerable doctors, physiologists and educators, failing to find satisfactory answers from any source. After more than a year and a half of intense pain and frustrating questions, Nelson found his way to physiologist and trombonist Jan Kagarice, one of the world’s leading authorities on musicians’ health. Kagarice diagnosed him with focal dystonia, chronic hyperventilation and Chvostek sign, and in a single lesson reversed 60% of his pain, immediately allowing him to play again.

His symptoms, it turned out, were the result not of some curious illness but of bad pedagogy – bad habits inherited from teachers working from a misunderstanding of the human body and the physical process of making music. “The stereotype is that brass players have chops problems and difficulty with endurance,” he explains. “But the entirety of brass pedagogy is not only physiologically destructive but physics-wise has very little to do with how sound is actually made.”

Five years after the onset of his symptoms, Nelson is fully recovered and playing as beautifully as ever, pain-free. Writing the ten compositions on this album meant excavating a number of difficult feelings, but the trombonist was intent on engaging fully and honestly with the full spectrum of his ordeal. He brings his experiences vividly to life with the help of his gifted collaborators, each of whom have played an important part in his life in one context or another, from the bandstand to the classroom. 

Nelson is hesitant to reveal the meaning behind his somewhat cryptic album title, but a few themes emerge: Ash and Dust make obvious references to things crumbling away and left behind, referring perhaps to the composer’s symptoms or incorrect approaches. The Chalkboard Cinema, meanwhile, suggests the somewhat illusory nature of education, jazz education in particular – lessons taught as gospel but more akin to the flickering images of the silver screen.

Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard Cinema traces each step along Nelson’s road to recovery, from the creeping onset in “It Starts Slowly (First in Your Heart)” to the confounding spiral of “Cyclical Maze (Round and Round We Go)” through the zen-like mantra “Do Nothing (If Less Is More),” a tribute to Kagarice and her life-altering teachings. “Behind Kind Eyes (Thank You)” is a meditation on the loss of a loved one, a nod to the tragedies that can occur around us while we’re struggling through our own, while “Closure is a Wasted Prayer (Release, Relax)” ends with the ambiguous acknowledgment that expecting any chapter of life to neatly draw to a conclusion is a fool’s errand.

“We always want closure,” Nelson says, “but it’s an almost laughable concept. I’m always going to be dealing with dystonia, but it’s not something that controls my life. The idea of putting a cap on this whole process does a disservice to the process of excavating these feelings and dealing with them. Everything that I learned about brass playing -- and more importantly about myself and what music-making really means to me –those lessons are priceless and I wouldn’t change a thing.”

peternelsonmusic.com

www.outsideinmusic.com