Rob Brown

Raining On the Moon is comprised of Parker’s ace quartet (Drake, Parker, trumpeter Lewis Barnes and alto saxophonist Rob Brown) plus two vital women, vocalist Leena Conquest and pianist Eri Yamamoto.

New York City's annual Vision Festival is quickly becoming one of this country's most prestigious showcases for free, creative, and experimental jazz music. To raise funding for the event, organizers have issued this limited edition two-CD set featuring the greatest hits of the 1997 festival.

The Peach Orchard is a generously proportioned document of a crack band in action. Its eight lengthy performances (the shortest lasts about 11 minutes, the longest about 25 minutes) were recorded in concerts at three different venues in New York City, the quartet's home. Each of bandleader William Parker's compositions honors an event or an individual.

Whit Dickey is a musician that has built his career through coherent and judicious choices. Not only regarding his participations in other musicians projects but also in the way he leads his own projects.

Every Whit Dickey’s recording shows the public a new concept of this band which is becoming cyclically deeper and reorganised in order to be considered in such a way. It occurred in Transonic (1998), With Dickey’s first album as a leader, it happened too in Big Top and Coalescence, and in what concerns In a Heartbeat, it is also true.

Being a drummer, Whit Dickey uses generally the piano when he composes. The pieces included in “Sacred Ground” are exceptions – this time, he chose the voice as compositional tool. That circumstance lead him to a particular purpose: to reinforce the melodical complexion of his music. And notice: the music of a drummer. This is not new, of course.

“Like new fire / Burning us down to the roots, past the roots”. These are the first two verses of the poem by Geral Schwartz that inspire this record. And Fire Music this is indeed, as the press call to free jazz and its heirs in the present scene.