Fefer / Revis / Taylor

Ritual

Label: Clean Feed Country: Portugal

"The Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi poem that you'll find in the booklet of the new album by the Avram Fefer Trio reminds us: "don't think all ecstasies are the same!" and "drink the wine that moves you". If you are ready for some potent new "wine" from New York City, then the music inside "Ritual" will bring you to another state of consciousness and ecstasy.

Saxophonist Avram Fefer possesses that "undeniable spiritual feel for the music", to quote what was written about this extraordinary musician by the online journal All About Jazz. Always positioning himself in the sequence of the jazz tradition, Fefer is more a visionary than an experimentalist in the scientific sense. That circumstance alone means that his music is not laboratorial, but deeply ritualistic. You don't need to be mystical or religious to really feel that it connects you with the Great Spirit of all things terrestrial, an achievement few before (among them John Coltrane and Albert Ayler) were able to accomplish. With a personal style fed by blues and gospel, you can recognize his roots and at the same time understand that what makes his voice so distinctive must come from something else---a spiritual restlessness, an ability to listen and feel his band mates, and a soulful intellect.

On Ritual, he got a big help from his friends Eric Revis and Chad Taylor -- like him globetrotters of musical idioms and aesthetics. Fefer's trajectory included work in the areas of trip-hop, acid jazz, jungle, funk, world music and rap; Revis is committed to both mainstream jazz (he works regularly with Branford Marsalis) and the avant-garde; and Taylor is equally recognized in the domains of creative jazz, electro-acoustic improvised music and alternative rock, in projects like Chicago Underground Duo, Trio, Quartet and Orchestra, Iron and Wine, and Isotope 217. What a trio!"-Clean Feed