All hands to the deck: Larry Goldings, Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart will release a new album, Rhombus, on 7 August through Smoke Sessions Records.
It ain’t yacht rock, me hearties. Mercifully it’s jazz instead.
That’s by the by! The trio’s latest record marks more than 35 years of collaboration and anchors away sees the group reinterpret compositions by major jazz figures including Keith Jarrett, Wayne Shorter, Abdullah Ibrahim, Thelonious Monk and Irving Berlin.
Recorded at Second Take Sound and produced by Paul Stache, the album blends standards with original material while pushing beyond the conventions of the traditional organ trio format.
Opening track “Everything That Lives Laments”, written by Jarrett – it was on The Mourning of a Star, sets an introspective tone. Other selections include Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly”, Shorter’s glorious Etcetera piece “Penelope”, Ibrahim’s “Mamma” and Monk’s “In Walked Bud”. Bernstein also contributes an original composition, “Dissipation Blues”, described as a reflection on the current political climate.
“When you play with each other for over 35 years, it becomes the bar that everything else is measured against,” Bernstein says. “Being comfortable, you’re prepared to take more chances, which is what improvisational music is all about.”
Goldings adds that the trio continued to evolve through collaboration and shared musical influences.
“We’re still discovering new freedoms through playing with each other,” he remarks. “The continuing challenge is to figure out how to make these disparate compositions sound like us.”
The group first emerged from performances at a place that was around from the mid-1970s to the late-90s called Augie’slocated at 2751 Broadway on the corner of West 106th Street in the Morningside Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan called Augie’s Jazz Bar.
Rhombus will be released in “spatial audio”. No, me neither.
Standing in a hangar hoping to be follically challenged with the wind blowing off your syrup not even a worry. Is that’s what meant? Possibly not. But the thought did intrude.
Audio booty to deck this out in includes limited-edition vinyl, CD should you wish to get all physical and audiophile HD formats if not and instead pretending not be dinosauric. Again.
The trio will perform album launch shows at label sister spot Smoke Jazz Club in New York from 19-23 August. Can’t wait for summer and this when it lands.
But Monk “specialist” the former accordionist Hans Groiner, should he be around to comment may be far more perplexed. I can hear him mutter:
“A rhombus is a flat, four-sided geometric shape – a quadrilateral – where all four sides are equal in length. But there are only three of them.”
