Command Freedman

Harry Freedman - Canadian Composers Portraits (2002) {2CD Set, Centrediscs CMCCD 8402}
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© 2002 Centrediscs | CMCCD 8402
Classical / Contemporary Classical / 20th Century

This recording is part of the Centrediscs’ Canadian Composers Portraits series which documents the emergence of a generation of pioneering professional composers who firmly established Canada’s place on the world’s musical map. Each release in this retrospective of the last fifty years is dedicated to a single composer and uniquely combines full-length documentaries on the composers’ lives and music, as well as a selection of their most important works. “Each of the performances is exceptionally well done, with precision and strong emotional presence.”

Few can match drummer Daniel Freedman when it comes to pan-stylistic jazz presentations that cut across cultural lines. This lifelong New Yorker has found a way to bridge sonic worlds, erase boundary lines, and merge various musical languages in masterful fashion in his own work and in support of others. It's no wonder why the best of the best—the one and only Sting, West African superstar Angelique Kidjo, and Israeli clarinet queen Anat Cohen, to mention three—have called on Freedman. He isn't nearly as well-known as he should be at this point, due in no small part to the fact that his sideman duties take up much of his time, but with each successive release under his own name he furthers his reputation as one of the most open-minded drummer-leaders on record.

If you go by his recorded output, there’s never a time that trumpeter Taylor Haskins has been normal. His early recordings show an intuitive awareness of the meeting points of post-bop and indie-rock, and his acuity in that particular area resulted in some music that rivaled what other like-minded souls, such as Ben Allison and Kneebody were doing at the time. The passing of time saw Haskins’ sound evolving into music that focused increasingly on melodic possibilities and how they would thrive in different environments. There was the folk-jazz of 2010’s American Dream, the chamber strings of 2014’s Fuzzy Logic and the 2011 electro-acoustic project Recombination. While a strong electronic presence is nothing new for Haskins, Recombination was emblematic of something more definitive. His newest recording Gnosis very much presents itself as the penultimate vision of that particular area of exploration.

Take an auditory trip through a wacky world of oddball and obscure “classick” exploitation cinema soundtracks from the 1960s and early 1970s, presented by one of the most beloved genre film video companies of all time…

Ron Carter is one of the most recorded bassists in jazz. In his mid-seventies at the time of these sessions, he is very much still at the top of his game as he leads the first big-band date of his own, with potent arrangements by conductor Robert M. Freedman and including some of New York's busiest musicians, including Jerry Dodgion, Steve Wilson, Wayne Escoffery, and Scott Robinson in the woodwind section, brass players Steve Davis, Douglas Purviance, and Greg Gisbert, plus pianist Mulgrew Miller and drummer Lewis Nash, among others. Freedman's charts are short and sweet, all of them under five minutes, with much of the focus on imaginative writing and Carter's melodic bass central in the mix. The material spans from the 1920s to the present, played with imagination…

A year after Les Paul's death, Jeff Beck saluted the guitar pioneer by staging a rousing tribute show to the great man at Paul’s regular stomping ground, the Iridium Jazz Club. Backed by his current running mates the Imelda May Band, Beck enlisted some heavy-hitters for help – Brian Setzer comes in for the rock & roll, Trombone Shorty for the jazz, Gary U.S. Bonds sings some oldies – all the better to get the party started. Despite its title, Rock 'N' Roll Party skews ever so slightly to the old-fashioned swing and standards that were Paul's specialty and with the notable exception of tightly wound versions of “The Train Kept A Rollin’” and “Twenty Flight Rock,” even the rockers feel closer to jump blues than rockabilly. And that’s fine: a tribute to Les Paul's music shouldn’t be greasy, it should be a jumping, joyous blast of nostalgia, which is precisely what this party is.