Attias, Michael

Spun Tree

Label: Clean Feed Country: Portugal

"Michaël Attias is the living proof that jazz is no longer an American music, but a universal one. The product of migrations spanning Morocco, Israel, France, Minneapolis and New York, he is a foreigner in every corner of the planet, but also one of us everywhere - the fact that his recording label is Portuguese says it all.

Rooted in his past collaborations with visionary masters Anthony Braxton and the late great Paul Motian, Spun Tree - assembling Ralph Alessi, Matt Mitchell, Sean Conly and Tom Rainey - is his first studio recording since 2004 and also his first to explore the sonority of the classic alto/trumpet frontline. If the music on his two previous Clean Feed releases (Renku in Coimbra and Twines of Cohesion) was about finding compositional shape through collective improvisation, this new album reverses the balance and returns to the more epic forms of Credo, his first.

In a journey from negative clarity to a negation of negation which equals joy, the eight new compositions - four large-scale multi-panel pieces and four "simpler" ones - balance size and density with enough air, intuition, rhythmic agility and interplay to keep all the branches of this tree spinning and dancing in the sunlight."-Clean Feed