Jazz Articles about Sketches

About Sketches

Album Review

Same musicians, same winning concept, great new songs: that's what awaits on the second volume of music from the quintet collective known as Sketches. This Brooklyn-based outfit works a unique angle with its own brand of cross-pollinated composition, whereby one musician brings in a tidbit of music that serves as the seed for a piece from the pen of another band member. It's a form of collaborative writing that allows both parties to work alone together.

Album Review

Sketches: Volume One

Read "Volume One" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
January 23, 2014

Compositional specificity can be a blessing and a curse. It's easy to understand how having every last instruction set to paper can be helpful when it comes to starting the music making process, but the flip side of that argument is that there's nothing left to actually create if everything is already there in black and white on the page. Jazz, as a form of creative music, has always wrestled to find a balance between structure and ...

Album Review

Sketches: Volume One

Read "Volume One" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 3, 2013

This Brooklyn-based jazz quintet comprised of nascent talent takes a unique approach to composition. Here, the musicians share a sketch from a notepad, denoting an incomplete composition or musical fragment and another band-member runs with it to use as a foundation for a new composition. Nonetheless, it's a balanced program, where the musicians fuse probing melodic content via regimented flows and loose grooves, while occasionally skirting the outside realm. Essentially, these pieces are structured by design, yet the band doesn't ...