Cavassa

Celebrated trumpeter and vocalist Bria Skonberg forges new foundation with What It Means, a heartfelt and hard-grooving homage to New Orleans, releasing July 26, 2024 via Cellar Music Group.

Celebrated trumpeter and vocalist Bria Skonberg forges new foundation with What It Means, a heartfelt and hard-grooving homage to New Orleans, releasing July 26, 2024 via Cellar Music Group.

Once upon a time, for a few years at the dawn of the 21st century, Avenue C in New York City's East Village had its own Zubin Mehta, its own Herbert Von Karajan, its own Daniel Barenboim. He was a veteran of both the Vietnam War and, even more heroically, NYC's avant-garde jazz scene. His name was Lawrence "Butch" Morris and he was a well-established legend. The orchestra he conducted and the repertoire they played differed considerably from those employed by the above-named gentlemen in style, substance, tools and content. It was a motley crew of musicians from a wide array of backgrounds, styles, disciplines and genres, and the music he drew out of them, far from a set-in-stone catalog of well-established pieces from the European classical tradition, was informed by jazz improvisation, feeding off of the electricity of the streets around them and spontaneously creating the sound of NOW, on the fly and out of thin air, brought to life by each exacting stroke of Butch's baton. Each performance was a unique moment never to be repeated and there were no "hits" you were guaranteed to hear.

Acclaimed saxophonist Joshua Redman makes his Blue Note debut with where are we, his first-ever vocal project which features vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Joe Sanders, and drummer Brian Blade plus special guests Nicholas Payton on trumpet, Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar, Peter Bernstein on guitar, and Joel Ross on vibraphone. At its core the album is both a celebration and critique of America—each song is about a specific geographical location in the United States—but it is also, to varying degrees, a ballads album, a standards album, an album of romantic longing, an album of social reflection, an album of melodic invention, and an album of improvisational adventure.