Casimir

With his project "The Windmills Of Your Mind", the born in 1964, saxophonist Stephan Abel has a long-cherished dream come true: On his 50th birthday, he recorded an album exclusively with ballads, a very intimate, personal double album where all the musicians involved shine with uncompromising openness and honesty.

Guiding the undulating, polyrhythmic, genre-ambiguous flow of drummer Makaya McCraven's ever-evolving "organic beat music," is a strategy not far removed from the one employed by Teo Macero and Miles Davis on Bitches Brew and subsequent dates: Here, moments from continuous improvised performances are digitally looped, cut, spliced, and edited into entirely new compositions. McCraven has been developing the approach for some time, though it came to fruition on 2015's brilliant In the Moment, culled from nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance at a single venue over a year, then processed and remixed into 19 individual pieces. McCraven takes a leap further out on the double-length Universal Beings. The set was recorded in four cities (New York, Chicago, London, and Los Angeles) with four ensembles. The players on these include bassist and fellow Chicagoan Junius Paul, cellist and former Chicagoan Tomeka Reid, U.K.-based saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, L.A. violist/arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, percussionist Carlos Nino, and Chicago ex-pat and current Angeleno guitarist Jeff Parker, to name a few.

Quantum Field Theory in curved spacetime, Hawking radiation, Unruh effect, quantum corrections to General Relativity