Anne Schüller Orbit

A three-year project comes to fruition for drummer/composer George Schuller, and he brings his bassist brother Ed and saxophonists Tony Malaby and George Garzone along for the ride. Of the seven of nine pieces the drummer wrote for this recording, many fall into a swinging free bop context allowing the tenor tantrums to exhaust themselves. Malaby and Garzone are quite expressive players, joining in lots of unison lines, occasionally going out, but mostly keeping within the written framework. ~ AllMusic

As is so often the case with music this adventurous, reactions are likely to be extreme: most probably will either love it or hate it. Both CDs from this set were recorded live at Rochester, NY's appropriately titled Bop Shop, a venue that has excelled at hosting the best artists on the radical fringes of jazz. Each CD features the sinewy trumpet of Paul Smoker with a different acoustic string bassist, Ed Schuller on the first and Dominic Duval on the second…

For a half-century now, as composer, conductor, instrumentalist, scholar, educator, administrator, jazz historian, and general activist, Gunther Schuller has been a unique and indispensable factor in our musical life. The three works on this disc, all composed within the space of a few months in 1993 and 1994, can hardly fail to be recognized as music of intensity, power and compassion, and indeed Schuller has acknowledged that they have a profound personal significance for him: two of the works bear loving testimony—in the most direct sense—to a unique and irreplaceable factor in his own life. They are memorials to his wife Marjorie, who died in 1992.