Home » Jazz Musicians » Michael Moss Discography

Quantum Butterfly Volume 4, Roots To Shoots

Buy Album

Request an album review

Michael Moss

Label: Fourth Stream Records
Released: 2026
Duration: 01:12:04
Views: 25

Tracks

Left Alone; Afro Blue; TTTT; Equinox; Come Sunday; Syeeda’s Song Flute; Transition; March On

Personnel

Album Description

The collection’s fourth and final volume is comprised of a particularly rousing concert in September 2025 at the Westbeth Center for the Arts by Moss’s ROOTS to SHOOTS ensemble. The latest line-up of Moss (reeds), Warren Smith (vibraphone), Alexis Marcelo (piano, synthesizer), and Adam Lane (bass), now includes veteran Jackson Krall on drums. The sold-out show was billed as a certain compendium of the leader’s career, reaching far back and well ahead to demonstrate a near lifetime of musical immersion. At the outset, Moss announced that he’d planned this project years ago. It was initially sidelined by the covid lock-down, but in light of the further passage of time, and the crushing losses incurred, this moment had arrived for this important event.

Opening the concert with Dolphy’s moving Left Alone, the leader’s flute rang over vibes, piano and cymbals in moods bridging pensive and quietly stormy. Coltrane’s Afro Blue follows, its classic strong melody over rolling rhythm was perfectly executed here. The now 91-year-old Smith took the first driving solo, his instrument shimmering into the room’s light fixtures, recalling Bobby Hutcherson’s 4-mallet approach in the era when the piece was still alarming. Alexis Marcelo’s piano solo, two-fisted in the best possible way, grabbed chunks of harmony and lobbed them at the band, his improvisation movingly reminiscent of the great McCoy Tyner whom we lost in 2020.

The ensemble next took on Bill Evans’ TTTT which, as Moss explains on the recording, was “Evans’ attempt to write in a Schoenbergian manner” with use not only of a tone-row but which Moss reworked into retrograde and then some. Once at tempo, the row became a very listenable jazz head, brought further into the mainstream in Marcelo’s capable hands, again recalling many of Tyner’s precise, terse chordal portraits. Fittingly, John Coltrane’s Equinox follows. Moss’s elegant tenor out front, his solo refusing to simply copy Trane while always offering the acclimation due. Jackson Krall seems particularly suited to the Coltrane works, his tendency to incorporate a thoroughly free dance over his drumkit catches much of Elvin Jones’ ceaseless thunder.

Next was another Trane classic, Syeeda’s Song Flute, the basic melody of which is simple at surface but harmonically remains a challenge 60-plus years later, though one would be hard-pressed to find ROOTS to SHOOTS struggling at any point. Their beautiful rendering clarifies why this music has been relevant over generations (and is it just me or was Trane possibly influenced by Bird’s Now’s the Time in composing this? Hard to say but if he was influenced, it was as much for the socio-political message as the bouncing tune).

The concert, and Volume 4, closes with yet another Coltrane work, Transition, which heartily speaks of the time and place, as well as Moss’s March On—something that could have been part of Sonny Rollins’ Freedom Suite. The latter’s head is developed off of a thriving repetitive riff ending on a suspension leading directly to a whispery Smith vibe solo of glimmering dyads, and a definitive Marcelo piano solo that alternates between mid-50s blue funkiness and fiery triple-time. Once Moss re-enters the field, his statement holds captive this ever-fascinating transitional period in jazz history, the one of his formative years, and the music’s, which he’d earlier described as the time when musicians were trying to figure out just what to call this still new thing.

Album uploaded by Michael Moss