by: Hrayr Attarian

Nick Biello – Soprano, alto saxophones and synthesizers
Phil Markowitz – Piano
John Benitez – Bass
Clarence Penn – Drums
Vincent Lionti – Viola
Paul Jones – Tenor saxophone
Andrew Renfroe – Guitar

Record Label: Truth Revolution Records

New York based saxophonist Nick Biello balances vibrant spontaneity with intricate and engaging compositions on his exciting release Vagabond Soul. On six originals, a standard and two brief interludes. Biello showcases his instrumental virtuosity and his masterful leadership skills. The music goes from earthy and soulful to hypnotically effervescent. The title track for instance has a loose swing and a funky groove. Guitarist Andrew Renfroe lets loose blistering and bluesy tones, while Biello and tenor saxophonist Paul Jones duet with muscular swagger and lithe elegance. The band embellishes the tune with clever twists demonstrating the synergy among its members.

Drummer Clarence Penn ushers in the conclusion with a rumbling and energetic solo. In contrast, on the breezy “Spiraling” Biello’s lines soar effortlessly over the rhythmic flourishes in captivating and mellifluous refrains. Renfroe improvises with intelligence and refreshing originality

By Dave Cantor

Designed as a narrative supported by 13 works from British visual artist David Emmanuel Noel, Pictures At An African Exhibition engages in tracing the history of humankind through song.

Based on Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, which the pianist wrote after visiting a museum and used what hung in galleries as a starting point, saxophonist Darryl Yokley claims the concept in order to compose a…

Brian McCarthy’s newest album, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is a Modern Jazz Masterpiece. The album is a collection of Jazz arrangements of Civil War music.

Horns charge like troops across the battlefield in the title track, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” making way for a mild but masterful flugelhorn solo.

McCarthy demonstrates his compositional prowess in his arrangement of “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” The horns flow soft and serene in contrapuntal harmony, driven by the percussive bari sax.

McCarthy’s own improvisational skills may be observed on numerous tracks throughout the album. But most impressive, perhaps, is McCarthy’s soprano saxophone performance on the song “Shiloh.” The soprano soars like a shining light above the fray of the wandering harmonic accompaniment below.

The album’s browning jewel, “Battle Hymn of The Old Republic” is a punchy deconstruction of the former tune, with choppy anticipation and syncopation, and playful reharmonization of traditional cadences.

The intent of the album, however, is not lost in the liberties McCarthy has taken. Echoes of “Taps” may be heard in the trumpet melody of the beautiful ballad, “Weeping, Lonely, and Sad.” The spirit of patriotism and resilience in the face of adversity may still be recognized in these familiar Civil War songs. McCarthy has produced a triumphant album, with a stellar cast of musicians.

“An inspired project.” (5 stars)
by paul sokal on July 29, 2017

This is a beautiful recording. This joining of familiar popular American tunes with inspired compositions and arrangements from a jazz sensibility is refreshing and joyful. Old familiar tunes sound brand new. This is a masterful work and a very musical representation of Lincoln’s counsel.

“The Better Angels Of Our Nature” (5 stars)
by Jeff@VTJazz on July 29, 2017

Brian McCarthy’s Nonet recording of well known and lesser known Civil War songs is a great example of how a jazz composer arranger can take any melody and transform it into a beautiful and complex jazz arrangement. As Brian stated at a recent Listening Session at Vermont Public Radio, the melody is the handle that anyone can hold onto as they are swept away listening to these beautiful jazz arrangements. I had the good fortune to attend one afternoon of these recording sessions and saw first hand how these great musicians treated these scores with the love and affection that each has for Brian and his wife Linda, the Producer. The result was truly a labor of love. I have listened to this recording many times and continue to be struck by the beauty of these arrangements. I liken the quality to the best arrangements for nonets in jazz led by the likes of Joe Lovano and Lee Konitz. This music will stand the test of time and many enjoyable listenings. I guarantee that the musical value you will receive for your purchase will exceed your investment of time and treasure.

by Robert Gluck

When Josiah Woodson picked up the trumpet at age 12 it was, as he says, like a pre-arranged marriage.

Now a Grammy award-winning sideman for his work on Beyoncé’s “Love on Top,” Woodson is a multi-instrumentalist with his own new album, ‘Suite Elemental,’ where listeners can hear his nature-inspired tracks in which he plays flute, guitar and piano.

“Why did I pick up the trumpet at age 12? I have no idea, It was just there,” Woodson says. “As soon as we got to the 4th or 5th grade and we got to choose, it wasn’t a choice. The trumpet was in my hands. I never wanted to play anything else.”

…Until he did.

Steeped in the tradition of black classical music (aka jazz), Woodson studied with some cool and talented people, including Kaleel Shaheed and Marcus Belgrave. A simple Wikipedia search proves Belgrave’s own lineage–he was tutored on the trumpet by the late-great Clifford Brown before joining the Ray Charles touring band. Belgrave also worked with jazz notables Ella Fitzgerald, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus.

Woodson understands his lineage and has a deep understanding of what these connections mean.

“I count myself as being lucky, incredibly fortunate to have had teachers that weren’t trying to be my friends; they were really mentors, especially Marcus Belgrave and Kaleel Shaheed,” he says. “They were loving and nurturing but they were tough on me. They were crushing, but at the same time inspiring. Those people are steeped in the tradition. That is one of the aspects of my artistry that I hold dear and I believe is incredibly important, more important than how well I play. It is something special to come from the progenitors of this music.“

Listening to ‘Suite Elemental’ shows just how far this young man has come, and in Woodson’s view, performing live with his band Quintessential is an act of love.

“I want people to come to my shows, fall in love with our music, and fall deeper in love with all music, especially live music,” he explains. “If they come they will be able to tell that I love music, that all the musicians in my band love music, and we have poured our passion fully into our craft.”

“Getting people to come to the show, I’m still trying to figure that out. That’s all marketing and we’re all in that game,” he says. “As soon as they get into the show I’m confident they will have a good time because I wrote all my music with love. I picked all my musicians with love. I picked musicians who love the music. You can hear that in the music, you can see it in our faces — you feel it and hear it. That is what is communicated to the audience. As I get in front of more people on bigger stages, I’m confident that’s the part of the music that gets people to say ‘Hey, go check out this guy, I saw his performance and it was great’.”

In a YouTube video, Woodson explains his vision for Quintessential, his Paris-based quintet that plays in the style of black classical music, athough the band members are from Martinique, Australia, and France, as well as the United States.

“Quintessential is a vessel that seeks to focus perceptions of sympathetic vibrations conducted by the physical manifestations of nature as they pass through the commonalities of the human experience into a unique exposition of emotional and harmonic resonance,” he says. “That is exactly what we’re about. The best explanation is always going to be listening to us live. The music is inspired by the elements.”

For example, on his album’s first track, “Eau,” Woodson uses the element of water as inspiration. Not a glass of water, but big bodies of water, like the oceans, that are soothing, calming, terrifying yet powerful.

“Water is life giving and life taking,” he explains. “When you listen to “Eau,” the first thing you hear is the intro, which reminds me of the movement of the waves, the back and forth ebb and flow on a beach, or the side-to-side movement of being on a boat or floating in the ocean — that calming effect. Then with different sections of the music there’s a little bit more trepidation in the water, more dynamics. Think of the bridge as sort of a rafting experience, where the music is twisting and turning through the rocks and through the way the river is going and it speeds up a little bit. That is reflected not only in the chord changes moving a bit quicker, but in the melody moving around those gravities, because there is a lot of modal mixture in there. At the end is the crashing of water. That symbolizes the water crashing and breaking against the rocks and eroding and constantly doing that.”

Woodson says this is not only describing the natural aspects of water, but aspects of life.

“We’re born and our mothers rock us. That is soothing and life giving. But then as life starts to get more complicated, there are different gravities that pull us in different directions and we have to navigate those things. Then life crashes us into the rocks but we have to survive.“

Woodson’s goal for listeners is an experience.

“Each experience is unique in that it is influenced not only by the movement of time, but how we are feeling in the moment, and what the audience is feeling in that moment. I want to give people the sense that we’re really about a communication and a communal experience.”

Having had communal experiences playing with artists like Beyoncé, Branford Marsalis, Clarence Clemons and Mos Def added to Woodson’s own experience, as will his upcoming gig playing with rapper Blitz the Ambassador at the Afro Punk Festival.

Still, after his incredible journey, does Woodson really care what people think? And does that affect his music?

“Yes and no, he claims. His answer is in the neutral zone of the artist’s creative spectrum.

“Part of the artist’s journey includes caring or not caring but that is all more like a spectrum,“ he says. “It is my daily work, introspective work, to care less and less because I want to be authentically me. I care what people think, and I listen to what people think, but perhaps it is more a neutral thing. I don’t want to not hear anybody and do what I want, but I also don’t want to be a doormat and become like a mimic just playing what I’m told to play.”

Moving forward, Woodson will keep on doing what he has been doing. He is a rare breed of musician. As multi-instrumentalist that plays his own music, Woodson in succession of artists like Prince, Curtis Mayfield or jazz’s own legend, Rasaan Roland Kirk. He’s at the pinnacle of a young artist’s career. “I play all over the place,” he says. “I record, I do tours with other people on different instruments, I write a little bit, I arrange for other people…”

Still, he remembers his mentors and respects his lineage, but remains his authentic self. When one of his mentors told Woodson to pick one instrument and focus on that, Josiah respectfully told him no. “I told him I did pick my instrument, and my instrument is music.”

The Curtis Brothers Quartet’s new album, Syzygy is dropping in mid-December where it will be (very) unfortunately overlooked as critics and listeners turn our collective attention to ‘best of 2016’ lists (nextbopincluded, of course). Don’t make that mistake.

The quartet (brothers Luques and Zaccai Curtis on bass and keys, respectively, plus Richie Barshay on drums and Reinaldo De Jesus on percussion) hits the ground running with a Rhodes- and percussion-driven taken on the Mongo Santamaria classic “Afro Blue”. This is well-covered territory and the quartet more than ably adds to the list of excellent covers of this tune. The whole thing is great, but the percussion breakdown toward the end of the tune is particularly special. This tune sets the vibe for the album, which also includes the quartet’s versions of classic tunes from Bud Powell (“Hallucinations”), Dizzie Gillespie (“Bebop”), Wayne Shorter (“Yes or No”), Cole Porter (“All of You”), Horace Silver (“Quicksilver”), and Marvin Gaye (“What’s Going On”), among others, plus the Zaccai Curtis-penned title track.

The album is full of highlights including “Yes or No”, with Luques Curtis’ bass locked in with the drums and percussion to provide a tremendous groove for Zaccai’s swinging piano, the percussive “Start the World I Want to Get On” with Zaccai on the Rhodes, the quartet’s take on “All of You”…

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT NextBop.com

Curtis Brothers Quartet: Syzygy

by PAUL RAUCH
March 6, 2017 

Jazz music is constantly in a state of flux. It feeds off of new ideas and innovation to keep the music vital, and growing. The mantle is passed from generation to generation, eschewing the infective glare of pop notoriety to maintain the artistic presence that moves the music forward, now seventeen years into a new century. In jazz today, there is a groundswell of young musicians who understand this perspective, forging new paths into the future, while grounded in the traditions of the past. They possess the understanding of paying dues, of developing one’s craft within the tenets of grand tradition, before making their own statements of innovation that define what jazz is today, and portends to be on the journey moving forward. This deep level of understanding and musical intelligence is what fuels musical insight, and original approach. 

There is a beacon of light emanating from New York City these days, that clearly illustrates this approach and subsequent innovative results, in the person(s), of the Curtis Brothers, bassist Luques, and pianist Zaccai. Originally hailing from Connecticut, the brothers began their musical journey at the Artist’s Collective, under the auspices of NEA Jazz Master Jackie McLean. Before heading to New York City, the brothers honed their respective crafts in the Boston area, Luques at Berklee College of Music, and Zaccai at the New England Conservatory. Since that time, the brothers have become true go to players with the likes of Eddie Palmieri, Gary Burton, Orrin Evans, Sean Jones, Brian Lynch, and Donald Harrison to name a few. They have recorded albums under the Curtis Brothers brand, including the brilliant Completion of Proof(Truth Revolution, 2012), and have created a recording collective, Truth Revolution Records, that has been producing albums of high quality for a few years now. The brothers have recently released a fabulous quartet album, Syzygy on that label, that brings to light their ability to combine their roots in bebop, hard bop, and latin, without a notion of being a hybrid, or fusion form. Indeed, it is spoken in one jazz commonality, one inventive dialect that is whole in itself. 

This album is not an effort to break down barriers, or forge into unknown territory, but a clear communicative statement of their own personal musical heritage within the jazz tradition. The music incorporates the blues, swings hard, and contains elements that speak to their music as being a confluence of jazz inroads that become a pathway for musical integration that speaks to itself as one. While many jazz artists these days refute what is undeniably the core root elements of the Afro-Caribbean-New Orleans tradition, Syzygy, blends blues harmonies with swing and latin rhythms, indeed all the classic elements of the jazz language, stating emphatically the vast amount of uncovered….READ MORE

Kris Allen is an excellent alto and soprano-saxophonist with his own sound. While Jackie McLean was a mentor, Allen has a cooler tone and does not sound at all like him. However like McLean, he has an open mind towards more adventurous approaches in jazz and he is forging his own path. Allen has worked with many top jazz artists and groups in his career thus far, including Illinois Jacquet, Gerald Wilson, Helen Sung, Winard Harper, Mingus Dynasty and Gary Smulyan among others….

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT L.A. Jazz Scene