Jamie Saft is a virtuoso pianist, keyboardist, producer, and composer from New York. His stylistic versatility, multi-instrumentalist capabilities, and production skills have been featured with Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, HR, The B-52’s, John Zorn, John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Donovan, Antony and the Johnsons, and Iggy Pop. Saft leads the New Zion Trio, The Jamie Saft Trio, and The Jamie Saft Quartet.
Jamie Saft and his dynamic trio presents a sparkling interpretation of the work of Bob Dylan. A lifelong Dylan enthusiast, Saft is the perfect man to take on this challenging project and his choice of compositions, spanning over four decades of activity, is as creative as the arrangements themselves. Featuring several guest vocalists including Mike Patton and Antony, this is a deep and meaningful tribute to one of the world’s greatest living songwriters, a Jew whose influence resounds in the work of several generations of pop musicians.
Two years ago, Nick Millevoi released Desertion, a record which found him diving into an old-school blues aesthetic, mutating it with his forward-thinking and experimental outlook. This quest for transforming standardised forms of blues, country and surf rock is now expanded, with Kevin Shea and Johnny Deblase joining Millevoi and forming the Desertion Trio. The band’s first record carries down the same path that Desertion explored, seeing the trio taking on jazz notions, desert rock passages, noise rock aggression and free-rock improv tactics. All these elements are passed through the band’s kaleidoscopic vision of rock music, presenting an extravagant result in their debut album, Midtown Tilt.
When future generations listen back to the sounds of this still young millennium, what music will remain to define the era? Master improvisers Bobby Previte, Jamie Saft and Nels Cline make their bid for immortality with Music From the Early 21st Century. While hardly representative of the hits streaming through the Bluetooth ether these days, Music From the Early 21st Century is nonetheless aptly titled, colliding as it's does entire threads of musical history leading up to the very moment of it's explosive creation. The album, captured live during a brief tour of the Northeastern U.S. in early 2019, is essentially a freely improvised organ trio set. But filtered through the lens of these three encyclopedically eclectic masters, it morphs continually from one prismatic hybrid of styles to another throughout it's ten carefully curated pieces.