VERISIMILITUDE

IN CONVERGENCE LIBERATION

Hailed by The New York Times as "a state-of-the-art musical thinker with a reputation for sure-footed futurism," and "one of the transforming figures of 21st-century jazz" by The Guardian, saxophonist/composer Steve Lehman has built a career creating innovative new music that packs the visceral wallop of live performance. Acclaimed for his groundbreaking work of melding spectral harmonies with modern jazz, he was voted the "#1 Rising Star Jazz Musician" in the 2015 Downbeat International Critics Poll and his prior album Mise en Ab�me the #1 Album of the Year in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll. Lehman continues his boundary-breaking work in a different vein with S�l�b�yone. The powerful new album draws from modern jazz, the rapping of Senegalese artist Gaston Bandimic, the underground hip-hop of HPrizm (aka High Priest of Antipop Consortium) and live electronics to create a dynamic form of urban experimentalism. Shifting rhythms, otherworldly electro-acoustic harmonies, contemporary sound design, and vocal gymnastics abound. And rather than simply co-existing and accommodating one another, the lyrical and the musical elements of S�l�b�yone are entirely integrated in exciting new ways. Add to that the unique juxtaposition of English and Wolof and one senses the unveiling of an entirely new musical realm.

The Other One, the latest from Henry Threadgill, is the musical component of a large multimedia work performed and recorded live at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, New York in 2022. The recording is comprised of a three-movement composition entitled "Of Valence," which was inspired by the percussionist and theorist Milford Graves, in particular, his integration of the human heartbeat into his musical works, and is performed by a 12-piece ensemble. All the hallmarks of Threadgill's music are here: unpredictable forms, unusual instrumental combinations that create surprising timbres, percolating rhythms, interwoven melodic strains, and masterful interlacing of composition with improvisation. The New York Times described the performance as possessing "a galvanic sense of swing," and "in lock-step with his every surprise rhythmic feint - producing an obliquely danceable, straightforwardly joyous Threadgillian energy." There is nothing else like it.

CONTINUUM

Unknown Rivers is bassist Luke Stewart's debut for Pi Recordings. An omnipresent and galvanizing force on the music scene, Stewart is a leader or co-leader of such bands as Irreversible Entanglements, Exposure Quintet, Blacks' Myths, Heart of the Ghost, and Remembrance Quintet. He is also among the most in-demand collaborators, having performed with the likes of David Murray, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, Jaimie Branch, Nate Wooley, Ken Vandermark and countless others. Stewart is also a curator and presenter of multiple concert series in New York and Washington, D.C., a writer, activist, producer and D.J. Featuring his long-running Silt Trio, with Brian Settles on tenor sax, and drummers Trae Crudup on four studio tracks and Chad Taylor on three live ones, Unknown Rivers sees the band pushing towards greater emphasis on rhythmic acuity, highlighting the different approaches to the music of the two drummers. Settles - a stalwart of the fertile Washington DC jazz scene - plays with a quiet intensity, possessing a sound that reminds of players from a distant past set against a modernist's vocabulary. Stewart is the master of a deep, wide groove that cushions and propels, making every musical situation he finds himself in sound good. The Quietus has called the band "gripping... relies on subtlety and insinuation to register it's uncanny power." The Silt Trio is that magical juxtaposition of playing with raw spontaneity while maintaining the music's intent and purpose.

RADIATE

VISTA ACCUMULATION

Zealous Angles is the first documentation of pianist/composer Matt Mitchell's long-running trio featuring bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dan Weiss. Mitchell has been called by The New York Times "a pianist of burrowing focus and an indispensable fixture of the contemporary vanguard." He is an anchor member of several significant and acclaimed creative music ensembles such as Tim Berne's Snakeoil, Dan Weiss's Starebaby, Miles Okazaki's Trickster, Ches Smith's We All Break, Kate Gentile's Find Letter X, Jon Irabagon's Outright!, Anna Webber's Simple Trio, John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble, Linda Oh's Aventurine, Caroline Davis's Alula, Jonathan Finlayson's Sicilian Defense, and the Dave King Trio. He also performs regularly with many of the foremost musicians and bandleaders in improvised music, including Steve Coleman Dave Douglas, Rudresh Mahanthappa, John Zorn, Darius Jones, among many more.

The compositions on Zealous Angles represent Mitchell's explorations into the simultaneous use of polymetric and polyrhythmic music in a group context. Composed elements featuring phrases of different lengths are played simultaneously by each musician, resulting in a wobbly rhythmic tension with pulses locking in in surprising ways. The musicians also have the freedom to direct their interaction by playing any of the lines at any time, with a goal towards playing with maximum improvisational freedom while achieving heightened levels of rhythmic fluidity. Despite the teeter-tottering nature of the music, there is a palpable sense of swing and groove, completely shattering the notions of what is possible within the jazz piano trio tradition.

SIXTEEN

Find Letter X, the eponymous release from the Brooklyn-based band led by drummer/composer Kate Gentile, features saxophonist Jeremy Viner, pianist Matt Mitchell, and bassist Kim Cass. Gentile's 2021 release Snark Horse - co-led with Mitchell - was a gargantuan six-volume set that Downbeat called "Monumental... Creating an abstract galaxy from scratch, they sound like they know every black hole and supercluster in the place." The similarly-ambitious new work - across three densely-packed CDs housed in a custom-designed package - bursts with inventive details and dramatic arcs. Each disc contains a distinct thematic identity while simultaneously contributing to a larger narrative trajectory. Meticulously-constructed and highly intentional, Find Letter X is a wide-ranging exploration of diverse sonics and contrasting forms: a vibrant feedback loop of virtuosic improvisational and compositional ingenuity entirely unified by Gentile's singular musical aesthetic.

Alto saxophonist Steve Lehman has arrived. The New York Times described his 2009 release Travail, Transformation and Flow as a breathtaking accomplishment and it's #1 Jazz/Pop CD of 2009. That album solidified Lehman's status as a young visionary composer with powerful new ideas about the future of jazz. On Dialect Fluorescent, Lehman defies his reputation as a future-fixated modernist and combines his own state-of-the-art compositions with a program of compositions by jazz legends like John Coltrane and Jackie McLean. But this album isn't just about paying homage every piece is treated as an opportunity to demonstrate a broad continuum of possibilities within the jazz tradition.

SYNOVIAL JOINTS

Bassist Kim Cass is among a vanguard group of Brooklyn-based improvisors who are creating works at the leading-edge of rhythmic acuity. Levs, his debut with Pi Recordings, features pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who called Cass "a singular composer and player: the man can do things that doesn't seem possible on the bass, displaying a technical command of the instrument on the level of the most celebrated virtuosic performers in any genre of music." The compositions on Levs are deeply idiosyncratic, built on stilts of complex, polyrhythmic structures over a sea of harmonic murkiness. Cass plays with a precision - often combining with the piano as a unified voice - that seems beyond the instrument's technical limitations. Sorey's structured improvisations on the drums alternately reinforces and disrupts. It might project a fa�ade of free improvisation, but exists as the direct result of intense, energetic coordination. Levs is volatile yet dreamlike, and imbued with a sense of ominous mystery.

Unknown Rivers is bassist Luke Stewart's debut for Pi Recordings. An omnipresent and galvanizing force on the music scene, Stewart is a leader or co-leader of such bands as Irreversible Entanglements, Exposure Quintet, Blacks' Myths, Heart of the Ghost, and Remembrance Quintet. He is also among the most in-demand collaborators, having performed with the likes of David Murray, Nicole Mitchell, Moor Mother, Jaimie Branch, Nate Wooley, Ken Vandermark and countless others. Stewart is also a curator and presenter of multiple concert series in New York and Washington, D.C., a writer, activist, producer and D.J. Featuring his long-running Silt Trio, with Brian Settles on tenor sax, and drummers Trae Crudup on four studio tracks and Chad Taylor on three live ones, Unknown Rivers sees the band pushing towards greater emphasis on rhythmic acuity, highlighting the different approaches to the music of the two drummers. Settles - a stalwart of the fertile Washington DC jazz scene - plays with a quiet intensity, possessing a sound that reminds of players from a distant past set against a modernist's vocabulary. Stewart is the master of a deep, wide groove that cushions and propels, making every musical situation he finds himself in sound good. The Quietus has called the band "gripping... relies on subtlety and insinuation to register it's uncanny power." The Silt Trio is that magical juxtaposition of playing with raw spontaneity while maintaining the music's intent and purpose.