General Notes on QUARTETS (Side A)
Quartets is out tomorrow.
While the press release tells one easily-digestible narrative about the album in the ballpark of about 700 words, my own story about the songs on the album can be more discursive and less tailored for the eyes of jazz writers.
Logistical Notes
Although this is technically my seventh album (following, in reverse chronological order: The Fate of the Tenor, The Depths of Memory, <3 Bird, (Un)seaworthy, The Sustain of Memory, and Trio), it's the tenth "disc" or set of music since it's my third double album, the other two being Depths and Sustain. I don't think I was intentionally waiting to release music specifically for the quartet format, but in my mind, this is the flagship format for jazz saxophonists—thinking of the Coltrane classic quartet, Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter's '60s Blue Note classics, and so on.
As a matter of practical consideration, I put this music out as a double album simply because I have a lot of recorded music to release and, in the interest of not delaying future releases, I put this pair of quartet sessions out at the same time so that they can be submitted for press consideration at once, rather than being staggered by 6 months or however long.
The first side was recorded almost exactly 2 years ago, toward the end of October 2022, and the music collects a number of compositions from before and throughout the pandemic era. Some of this music had been intended for premiere at Ohad Talmor's SEEDS on March 18, 2020, which we canceled and eventually postponed to the quartet residency that took place in April 2023.
Notes on the Songs
I actually submitted a rehearsal excerpt of "Dance Notation" for a grant in May 2020 (which I didn't get), with these accompanying notes:
As of late 2019 and early 2020, I’ve focused my energy on composing shorter works for jazz quartet (saxophone, piano, bass, drums) that continue to explore the possibilities for improvisation that I laid out previously in my longer works such as “The Middle of Tensions.” The return to the shorter song form after two years of mostly composing extended works has given me a chance to isolate more specifically the points of musical interest that I find most vital and promising.
In “Dance Notation,” I wanted to see what would result when combining a back beat-oriented groove with an extremely difficult-to-notate set of polyrhythms played atop the groove, and if it was possible to allow for soloistic or group improvisation. In this excerpt, the initial backbeat is dotted with coordinated attacks from saxophone, piano, and bass, which provide the outline for the polyrhythms to come.
"Far East Western," composed during the lockdown era in 2020, was originally titled "Kurosawa-ish" and was directly inspired by Yojimbo, with the idea to have a loose group of elements coalesce into a Western-type showdown (the repeating 6-note bass line and subsequent free improvisation).
I'm fairly confident that nobody would have ever guessed that the composed piano introduction to "Shadows Over the Sea" was derived from an improvised line by Ethan Iverson over his tune "Aviation" (based on George Shearing's "Conception") from a Village Vanguard livestream in June 2020; it is that line backwards, with the primary portion of the melody and composition emerging from that source.
"Melpomene" belongs to a genre of ensemble hocket pieces that orchestrate an idea (in this case, closely voice-led harmonies in 4 parts) rhythmically across different instruments. In the middle, the bass line shifts gears linearly between quintuplets, sextuplets, and septuplets, creating an effect of speeding and slowing which bears a noncoincidental resemblance to similar devices in the famous "Autumn Leaves" arrangement from Wynton Marsalis's Standards, Volume 1 and more recent pieces like Mark Turner's "Brother Sister."
"And the Oscar Goes To," a chorale derived from melodic material in Charlie Parker's "An Oscar for Treadwell," was composed for The Jazz Gallery's Lockdown Sessions and premiered in February 2021. The original, spookier rendition was programmed for Nintendo Game Boy, courtesy of Jacob Shulman. The original version of this piece ends at the final fermata, but we added a brief free improvisation for this version where Dana traces the ripples of the final chord, with a touch of surreality added through reverb that slowly envelopes and consumes the final notes.
"Storied History" had a relatively long and troubled development process compositionally for me. I drafted it initially in October 2017, a full five years before we recorded it, making it the oldest tune on side A; it was called "Button Pusher" and started with the same set of overwhelming and relentless descending arpeggios, but with a complicated contrapuntal bass line. I eventually scrapped the bass line and added hits and changes instead, and for a while we actually improvised over the mixed-meter form. That ended up feeling too claustrophobic and boxy, so I scrapped that and spread the changes out over good old 4/4, with an additional coda that takes the contour of the melody of "All the Things You Are" and lays it over the ridiculously disparate chord changes of the song. That is to say, the nod to ATTYA is more of a wink and a late addition rather than core to the song, and it gave me the inspiration to retitle the piece in reference to the jazz tradition. Similar to the other AATYA-related piece on side B, "That Lights a Star," this one ends with an extended piano trio coda.
"Title Theme (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)" dates to my dive into video game music in mid-2022, with the only arranging on my part being the key (suitable for playing ringing harmonics on the bass) and changing the B section to 3/4 to prevent the song from experiencing a loss of momentum during that portion. I originally intended to track multiple choruses of the melody in order to excerpt only the most interesting or compelling portion for release, but the take ended up being magical on its own and is heard in its entirety here.
Notes on the Cover Art
The cover art was designed by Diane Zhou and features two sets of four photos (two "quartets") spread across quadrants. They're all 35 mm photos that I took over the past few years, with the outer perimeter of each quadrant featuring the following (clockwise, from top left):
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| Prospect Park, February 2024 |
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| My childhood home the morning of my 32nd birthday, November 2023 |
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| Sourland Mountain Preserve (NJ), November 2023 |
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