A meeting in NY's Lower East Village between four improvisors--Robert Burke on saxes, George Lewis on trombone & electronics, Paul Grabowsky on piano & snare drum, and Mark Helias on acoustic bass--playing a pre-composed work, blending 21st century composition with modern jazz sensibility, enhanced by Lewis' computer-based "shapeshifts".
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2017 Country: UK Packaging: Digipack Recorded at Eastside Sound Recording Studio, in the Lower Eastside, New York, on July 26th, 2014 by Marc Urselli.
"This musical collaboration originated with four improvising musicians meeting in a New York recording studio in the Lower East Village - to play - without a pre-composed composition; just belief, expertise and creativity. The cornerstone of the composition is the bringing together of musicians that come from a jazz sensibility but improvising music that is very much music of the 21 century; more specifically the improvising musician and machine. The machine, operated by George Lewis, creates its own 'voice' through 'in the moment' improvisations that enhance and multiply or as George promulgates 'shapeshifts'. Improvisations include experimentation, taking positions, trust, choice, agency, creativity, determinacy and indeterminacy. Further, this project is about innovation through the agency of human and mechanical interaction; the understanding of how the musician interacts with the machine is an area of interest that is relevant to twenty-first century as it allows the creation of greater possibilities, greater opportunities and ultimately freedom to express."-Rob Burke
"The music on this CD is the result of four musicians with a background in jazz coming together to experiment and create music without the need for critical approval either from institutional oversight or industry-enforced norms and prerequisites. And because each is free to express himself as a collaborating individual without genre-based limitation, the music they create is 'free' music. As well as the analogue instruments, the music has input from the shapeshifted voice of the Ableton controller, a machine operated by George Lewis that records phrases and snippets of music in situ, digitally alters them and feeds them back into the music-making process, providing the musicians with another cue to which they can react. The music, as all music does, starts with an idea and the enthusiasm of the players to chase it, to play with it as well as to play it, to use their expertise and experience to de- and re-construct it, to improvise around it and eventually to reconcile it in a synthesis that satisfies them and gives the willing listener a new and exciting aural experience. This is music that liberates."-Andrys Onsman