Embarking on an exhilarating journey into uncharted musical territories, pianist Bram de Looze assembles a quartet of extraordinary talent, featuring Joey Baron on drums, Thomas Morgan on double bass, and Hank Roberts on cello. This convergence of masterful musicians promises a transcendental exploration of sonic landscapes, where spontaneity, intuition, and boundless creativity intertwine. At Brussels Jazz Festival in Flagey, the four musicians proved to be world class storytellers through music. With unexpected twists and turns, they weaved an evocative narrative, always supporting the music, claiming the moment as a group without feeling the need to overpower each other. This magical performance was captured by VRT Radio Klara and, luckily, will be enjoyed for generations.

Hank Roberts presents: On his debut album "Black Pastels" he put together the most innovative musicians of the N.Y. Jazz scene: Tim Berne, Ray Anderson, Robin Eubanks, Dave Taylor, Bill Frisell, Mark Dresser and Joey Baron. He wrote jazz history with the group "Miniature" and the song "Jersey Devil", and the Knitting Factory became a meeting point for the avant-garde scene. With Mark Feldman and Mark Dresser he formed the chamber music string trio Arcado and with Django Bates he played "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and opened up never-before-heard worlds of sound.

The music from Richter 858 was originally commissioned and recorded to accompany a book of paintings by Gerhard Richter, which was only available in limited quantities back in 2002. Tony Reif of Songlines decided to rescue the recordings from obscurity, and re-released them in early 2005. The band is Frisell on guitar and delay, Eyvind Kang on viola, Jenny Scheinman on violin, and Frisell's old bandmate Hank Roberts on cello. The pieces were directly inspired by a specific painting, and recorded live to two-track with no editing or overdubs. In the booklet are thoughts and guidelines given to Frisell by producer David Breskin and an interview on the subject with Frisell, and they shed a great deal of light on the process of how this music was created. Since art is, of course, a subjective thing, you may or may not feel that the music directly relates to the paintings, but there's no denying that this is a fascinating project. The majority of the songs are built on simple repeated figures, and the players all seem free to embellish and improvise on top of that. Frisell's delays play a major role in this music (Breskin points out that Richter's technique of applying a squeegee to wet oil paint is analogous to Frisell "smearing" notes by manipulating his delay), and the way he uses the delayed guitar signal to complement, and in some cases mimic, the strings is quite amazing (remember, this was done live with no editing). It's been years since Frisell has made such extensive use of the delay, but he's still an absolute master. There is also a minimalist quality to the pieces, but the interplay between guitar, delay and strings keeps them from becoming static. Most of this album is quite serene and beautiful, although there are a couple of hairier moments. The paintings themselves are also reproduced in the booklet, and also as enhanced content on the disc itself, which is encoded for Super Audio playback. This is a very interesting new sound for Bill Frisell, and apparently this band is developing more music together outside the scope of the original project.