Nate Wooley

The name “Basso Continuo” refers not to early music but rather to the double double bass backbone Mike Bisio and Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten provide to Stephen Gauci’s quartet.

If having a balletic sense of time made percussionist Jeff Arnal very requested among choreographers, his hability to deploy a wide range of colors and dynamics turned him into a composer, even when he’s just improvising.

“Quadrologues” is the second Clean Feed release by the New York based quartet Transit. This collection of pieces integrates the tradition of jazz and the never obvious approaches to music. Each piece reveals an intelligent design with a clarity of purpose. Static and the hyper activity of free-jazz are equal partners in Transit's compositions.

The Daniel Levin Quartet has already shown on prior recordings that a change of conventional instrumentation in a jazz combo is enough to explore an entirely different world of musical gesture, timbre, and expression. In the case of this latest release, Levin dispenses with his own convention of using song structures as the basis for improvisation.

Daniel Levin formed his quartet in 2002. The first gig was at CBGB's in New York City and over the past 8 years, the band has covered a lot of musical territory.

Tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Matt Bauder represents brilliantly the new type of musician existing in this beginning of the 21st century, one that is aware of the most distinctive musical idioms, in some way synthesizing those genres in a personal approach.

Music may be an abstract art, meaning, as Stravinsky used to say, “nothing more than its own sounds”, but when it's presented with a title like "Organic Modernism", we have some food for thought.