Since the days of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the guitar/bass/drums trio has been convened by visionary tone scientists as a laboratory for music of primal power and tonal subtlety. ON COMMON GROUND features three such players. Mike Sopko has explored the frontiers of the guitar with Los Lobos and Dosh, Thomas Pridgen. Laswell, like Sopko a Midwesterner, here transmutes the industrial crash and hum of the region into music of muscular authority. Even followers of the protean career of composer, instrumentalist and conceptualist Tyshawn Sorey might be surprised by the oceans of primal rhythm he conjures here. Together, the sounds brought into being by these 3 improvisors are at once grounded in a deep inquiry of traditions that span space and time while cracking open a window onto eternal radiance. This is fearless music, the kind that can only be made when master musicians meet ON COMMON GROUND.
You can often judge musicians by the company they keep. Float the Edge, the latest album from pianist-composer Angelica Sanchez, features her alongside two of the most sought-after rhythm-section musicians on the scene: veteran bassist Michael Formanek and rising-star Tyshawn Sorey, both acclaimed leader-composers in their own right. To be released via Clean Feed Records on March 25, 2017, Float the Edge sees this earthy, expansive trio perform Sanchez’s compositions, as well as several free improvisations. “A lot of what we do as a trio and what each of us does living a life in this music is take things to the edge, taking the risk to jump off without really knowing where you’re going to land,” the pianist says. “When it works, you feel like you’re floating it’s beautiful.”
Focusing on the brilliant cellist Jay Campbell, soon to be a new music superstar, along with the equally masterful Michael Nicolas, Chris Otto and Stephen Gosling, these three powerful compositions take chamber music to a whole new level of intensity. Three realizations of Zorn’s infamous composition for two celli “Ouroboros” (two featuring guest percussionist Tyshawn Sorey) along with his canonic puzzle “Occam’s Razor” and the ten metaphysical ambiguities comprising the piano trio “The Aristos,” this is chamber music as you have never heard it before— visceral, intense and powerfully emotional.