#drew gress

[musicollage]

Jason Robinson — Ancestral Numbers I. 2024 : Playscape.

[soundgrammar]

Listen/purchase: Le pavot rouge by SYLVIE COURVOISIER feat. Wadada Leo Smith, Christian Fennesz, D. Gress, N. Wooley, K. Wollesen

[dustedmagazine]

Sylvie Courvoisier — Chimaera (Intakt)

Duration can be a double-edged sword. When it’s handled wrong, longer-form music can just feel long. And in an age when a preponderance of music is served up in three or four minute-long bites, a tune doesn’t need to be too long to feel like a bit of a chew. But duration can justify itself by allowing a listener to untether the listening experience from recognizing structural elements and marking their repetitions. That’s certainly the case with the music on Chimaera, the debut album by a combo led by Sylvie Courvoisier that bears the same name. 

Chimaera is an outgrowth of Courvoisier’s trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wolleson. To their number she added Nate Wooley, who brings a deep bag of extended trumpet techniques and an even deeper interrogative spirit, and Christian Fennesz, whose application of electronics can transform the sound of his guitar beyond recognition. And for this session, she added another trumpeter, Wadada Leo Smith.

One might expect a band named after a fire-breathing, two-headed beast to singe some ear hairs, but that’s not really the case. It’s more likely that the Swiss-born pianist and composer, who has been based in Brooklyn since the late 1990s, chose it for its mythological dimension. The album’s compositions were inspired by the paintings of Odilon Redon, a direct predecessor of surrealism. Their length permits the listener to be simply be present as the music manifests in diaphanous layers of color and forms that are perceptible, but not always recognizable. Gress begins “Le Pavot Rouge,” the album’s opening track, with a questioning, bluesy figure introduction. In short order, he parts a veil of shimmering piano and vibraphone (Wollesen plays vibraphone as drum kit much of the time, which substantially shifts the weight and character of sound away from piano trio conventions), and then takes up a spare, abstracted tango rhythm. Over the next 20 minutes, musicians enter and exit the action. One trumpet takes up the querying vibe, and the other resolves it. The guitar floats dubby echoes over the pulse. Courvoisier darts out of the vibes at double speed, or complicates some brass harmonies with spare dissonant notes.

In other settings, such as her duo with Mary Halvorson, Courvoisier favors abruptness and density. Chimaera’s music is no less eventful. But it drifts instead of bursting, inviting the listener to surrender to a sequence of dissolutions, reconstitutions, and surprising elaborations across six compositions and 87 minutes of dream-like music.

Bill Meyer

[mostlymonk]

Bemsha Swing

Fred Hersch Trio

Fred Hersch – piano Drew Gress – bass Billy Hart – drums

[saidthewizard]

“Night Whispers” ...

... is the concluding part of pianist Marc Copland's trilogy New York Trio Recordings, the first two volumes being Modinha (2006) and Voices (2007).

On Night Whispers (2009, Pirouet Records PIT3037), Bill Stewart replaces Copland's longstanding drummer Jochen Rueckert. This track is called So What - a somewhat misleading title perhaps because I can't believe anyone would offer an indifferent shrug to playing of such excellence!

Marc Copland, piano Drew Gress, bass Bill Stewart, drums

[onett199x]

John Abercrombie | Within A Song

This is one of the more recent albums by guitarist John Abercrombie, released in 2012 and featuring Joe Lovano on sax, Drew Gress on double bass, and Joey Baron on drums.  An all-star lineup, in other words, and the tracklist is an all-star lineup as well, including Miles Davis’s Flamenco Sketches, John Coltrane’s Wise One, and Bill Evans’ Interplay.  It’s a recipe for success, and it pays off - this is a strong album of guitar/saxophone quartet jazz that should please both fans of straight-ahead jazz and the somewhat more modern sound.  It mostly sticks to the straight-ahead thing, but there are a few tracks where it bends the rules a little.  At any rate, it’s very good and worth checking out.

[musicollage]

Sylvie Courvoisier Trio – D'Agala. Intakt : 2018.

[musicollage]

John Abercrombie Quartet. Up And Coming, 2017. ECM 2528. ( Drew Gress, Joey Baron, Marc Copland )