Russ Lossing / John Hebert: Line Up

Avant Jazz / Free Improvisation / Avant-Garde
premiera polska: 2008-03-21
seria wydawnicza: OGY SERIES
kontynent: Ameryka Północna
kraj: USA
opakowanie: Triplefoldowe etui
opis:
Editor's info:
When one hears Michael Adkins for the first time, there's a certain shock, not just at the presence of a new voice but that such a musician might arrive fully formed.
There's something unexpected in the sheer weight of his sound and depths of meaning that impinge in his lines. It might be noted that Adkins presents himself here as a tenor saxophonist, without that usual leap to the soprano or something else, a movement almost expected of those setting out to play jazz's dominant horn.
Now that suggests a player very deeply involved in the formation of his own voice, a preoccupation to which this session attests, even to a concern with an authentic sense of speech. - Stuart Broomer

All About Jazz:
A gigantic album from an extraordinary "new" tenor saxophonist. Rotator is actually Michael Adkins' second disc as leader, but his first-Infotation (Semblance Records, 2005), recorded back in 2000 and five years finding a label-slipped under the radar of many people, including this listener. Thirty-something Adkins, brought up around Detroit but based in New York since 1998, seems to have sprung fully formed from whatever mould they make great tenor players in.
Adkins' playing has the gravitas of someone 20 years his senior and his sound has the gruff, bluesy, seasoned weight which distinguished the best hard bop tenormen of the late 1950s/early 1960s. His tone is often vocalized and makes attractive use of multiphonics in the mid and lower registers, but is free of chalk-down-a-blackboard, high-end harmonics. It's a pleasure just to roll around in the sound.

It gets even better. Adkins' writing-and all eight pieces here are Adkins originals-is singular and luminously of today. It's typified by terse, repeated, circular motifs, which Adkins in his improvisations obsesses on, worries at, approaches from different angles, buffs and burnishes and generally turns inside out before passing the torch to one of the other players.

The blues-informed "Number Five," a representative track, sounds like it's something John Coltrane might have recorded with Thelonious Monk-but not in 1957, next year. Less typically, though even in rough diamond mode Adkins is in his own way always lyrical, the pastoral "Forena" suggests today's Charles Lloyd. Adkins sounds unlike anyone you ever heard before-but at the same time, like someone who's always been with us.

The band is just perfect. Bassist John Hebert played on Infotation, and it's he, presumably, who introduced Adkins to pianist Russ Lossing-the free-spirited and righteously swinging Hebert and Lossing are longtime playing partners whose decade-long association has now been marked by their first duo album, Line Up (Hat Hut, 2008). The drummer is modern master Paul Motian-approaching twice Adkins' age but immortal, his genius for supple, quasi-melodic, backbeat-free yet propulsive rhythm undimmed.

Rotator is absolutely essential listening for anyone who loves tenor saxophone. An important new voice has arrived.
By Chris May

muzycy:
Russ Lossing piano
John Hebert double bass

utwory:
1 Monotype 4:16
2 Fais Do-Do 2:52
3 Blind Pig 5:58
by John Hebert
4 Type A 2:57
5 Hitchcock 3:21
6 Line Up 4:56
by Russ Lossing
7 All Alone 3:59
by Irving Berlin
8 Hamburg 3:55
9 Stick The Landing 3:58
10 For A.H. 4:00
by John Hebert
11 Type O 3:18
12 Cross Circuits 2:55
13 Whirlygig 4:43
by John Hebert
14 Pitter Panther Patter 4:26
by Duke Ellington

total time - 55:43
wydano: 2008-02
nagrano: Recorded at Systems Two, Brooklyn N.Y. on July 6th, 2006
more info: www.hathut.com