Negative Press Project

In an era when there’s no respite from bad news, when it’s difficult to tell the difference between headlines in the Onion and the New York Times, Negative Press Project comes bearing the best of tidings. After a fruitful hiatus following 2023’s The Victorious Sessions (recorded in 2019), the chamber jazz ensemble led by pianist/composer Ruthie Dineen and bassist/composer Andrew Lion is back with the first volume of its most ambitious undertaking yet, Cycles I, an exquisitely orchestrated work featuring the innovative string ensemble Friction Quartet and released by Envelopmental Music. 

Founded a decade ago by a cadre of graduates from Berkeley’s California Jazz Conservatory, NPP gained widespread notice with their second album, the critically hailed 2017 instrumental project Eternal Life | Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds. But the ensemble has mostly focused on the original works of Dineen and Lion, and Cycles I marks a creative leap for both composers. Distinguished by a rich synthesis of elements from classical music, minimalism, pop, and jazz, the music came to fruition during the first years of Covid, when the pandemic, its attendant dislocations, and other life changes transformed NPP’s work flow.

Lion relocated to Bend, Oregon, while Dineen was engulfed by huge responsibilities both as a parent and executive director of the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. Other founding members of the group, which evolved out of the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley, have also left the region, but Cycles I brings everyone back into the fold, including saxophonists Chris Sullivan, Lyle Link, and Tony Peebles, trumpeter Rafa Postel, guitarist Luis Salcedo, and drummer Isaac Schwartz (with guest contributions by clarinetist Ivan Arteaga, percussionist Ami Molinelli, and trombonist Patrick Malabuyo).

The music reflects the dire times in which it was created, but perhaps more significantly it embodies the determination of the artists to persevere. “Even going through the writing process, we were living the experiences, the massive cultural collective experience, that we were writing about,” Lion says. “Ruthie’s compositions instill a feeling of hope, in contrast to some of what might come in Cycles II.”

The album opens with a startling wave of beauty. Lion’s meditative “Shoten Zenjin (Morning Arrives for Aya)” sets the album’s emotional tone with shimmering cinematic textures shaped by Friction’s full integration and a patient, bossa-tinged melody that ebbs and flows along a telegraphic piano figure. At almost 11 minutes, it’s an extended piece that moves through a Bartók-inspired string introduction into a sweeping orchestral theme, a rapturous Chris Sullivan alto sax solo, and an outro restating the theme like a soothing balm.  

Dineen’s “Aelorean” was composed on October 21, 2015, which happens to be the destination date of the DeLorean featured in the 1985 hit film Back to the Future. The wordplay of the title stems from the tune’s use of the Aeolian mode. Opening with Schwartz’s drum passage, the piece proceeds with relentless momentum that builds with Tony Peebles’s coruscating tenor solo and Friction Quartet’s improvised response.

“The piece is all about time, the future and now,” Dineen says. “The energy and power of the piece reminds me of Back to the Future, all about cars and hovercrafts, and I just wanted it to be fun to play, like we’re on a ride together. The whole crazy section in the middle is about what could it be like in another 50 years.”

Continuing her reflections on vehicles and the confounding nature of time, Dineen’s “Cycles Brilliant” opens with some tangy string dissonance. Written in La Farine Bakery, where she was inspired by a poster of an old-fashioned Paris bicycle, the piece reflects on a moment when the two-wheelers were the exciting new thing via the cyclical figures traced by the horns. Lion’s “Waltz in Progress,” the album’s longest piece, unfurls with unhurried grace—a birth, death, and rebirth song cycle. Postel’s elegant trumpet solo sets the scene, which shifts perspective through each section.

If every piece before it feels like an extended sojourn, Dineen’s “Be” arrives in the middle of the album as a calming through-composed oasis rippled as Friction caresses Postel’s burnished delivery. It’s a deep breath before Lion’s “Libre,” a fluid piece that keys on a long bass passage as tension builds and releases and builds again with Dineen’s cascading block chords. The album’s centerpiece is Dineen’s “Hold and Keep This Flower,” which she introduces with a brief string quartet prelude. As Link’s solo soprano is joined by the fellow reeds, the first half evokes an intimate family gathering. The strings add a cinematic sheen as Peebles’s tenor croons tenderly.

Inspired by the graphics of her cousin, Berlin-based visual artist Mateo Dineen, “Miles to Go” is an early NPP piece that has evolved into a pulsing soundscape suggesting unexplored worlds. The brief string quartet reprise opens a portal to yet another strange realm. As if completing an extended journey, Dineen’s “Waters” brings the ensemble home with a gently flowing piece led by Peebles’s assured tenor sermon and supported with Arteaga’s affable clarinet. And as a luminous lagniappe, Dineen’s string quartet arrangement of her piece “Jerusalem,” a spiritually charged plea for piece she wrote while flying home from a visit to the holy city. Like a supplication, the theme repeats three times, a crescendo of hope and longing. It’s also a preview of Cycles II, which concludes with a full ensemble version of the piece.  

An album full of surprises is exactly what listeners have come to expect from Negative Press Project, an ensemble that has carved out a singular niche since its impressive 2015 debut album see evil eyes | civilize—which focused largely on Dineen and Lion originals—followed by 2019’s withIN and 2023’s The Victorious Sessions. The group earned a good deal more attention with Eternal Life | Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds, which introduced NPP’s sumptuous pop-embracing chamber jazz sound. Encouraged by ace bassist Jeff Denson, who released the album on his Ridgeway Records, Lion and Dineen concentrated on writing and arranging for the ensemble.

“That’s my favorite thing in the world, pulling people together who are serious to create group identity and group story,” Dineen says. “There are many voices, but we all come together to tell one story. We’re both really driven to create new art.”

Born (September 7, 1982), and raised in the Northern California town of Fairfield, the Salvadoran-American Ruthie Dineen was drawn to music as a child, studying and playing jazz and classical music throughout adolescence. Music remained a central force in her life throughout her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley studying history and music, and graduate studies in social work at Cal State East Bay. Over the past decade she’s focused on music performance and community arts, and since the fall of 2011 she’s played a leadership role at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California. At the same time, she immersed herself again in jazz, earning a performance degree in jazz studies from the California Jazz Conservatory (where she received the Jamey Aebersold Scholarship).

She has composed prolifically for multidiscipline works encompassing theater, music, dance, poetry, and visual art, and has performed widely with leading salsa, Latin jazz, and other Latin dance bands. Over the past decade she’s collaborated with a wide range of artists, including the Venezuelan group Bululú, the Amaranth String Quartet, and RDL+ (which she co-leads). It was her experience with Amaranth that led to NPP’s involvement with Friction.

Overseeing a rehearsal of “Refuge,” a piece she wrote for the quartet in response to the deadly Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, “it was the most amazingly intense experience I’ve ever had, even though I wasn’t playing,” she recalls. “The way they play and listen and breathe together was so powerful. For Cycles, we knew we wanted a working quartet, a unit that could come together with our unit.”  

They found the ideal string ensemble in Friction. Featuring violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Stephanie Bibbo (at time of recording), and cellist Doug Machiz, the quartet formed in 2011 and made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. At the center of the Bay Area’s roiling creative string scene, they’ve been championed by the likes of composer John Adams and Andy Akiho. With Cycles I, NPP and Friction meld into an orchestral gestalt.

A fellow CJC graduate, Andrew Lion was born (June 29, 1970) and raised in Oakland on a rich musical diet from his parents’ record collection, absorbing the sounds of Motown, Led Zeppelin, Duke Ellington, the Beatles, David Bowie, and Pat Metheny Group. He started his musical journey on piano, then tried out the guitar before settling on electric bass as a young adult. A mainstay on the Bay Area music scene, he’s toured with the rock band Spoke and the Dave Tweedie–directed pop combo OONA featuring vocalist Oona Garthwaite. He’s also worked nationally with former San Francisco– and now Philadelphia-based singer/songwriter Jeff Campbell, with whom he performed on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Amid his rock and pop career (which continues today), Lion decided in 2006 to expand his instrumental arsenal to include double bass under the guidance of bass expertGlenn Richman. With encouragement from pianist Susan Muscarella, the founder of the California Jazz Conservatory, Lion plunged into jazz and Brazilian music studies, mentored by bassist/singerJeff Denson, and Grammy-nominated Brazilian multi-instrumentalistMarcos Silva, with whom Lion toured the Pacific Northwest in recent years. He graduated from the CJC in 2016. In Dineen, Lion has found an ideal creative foil, “my longest running creative partnership,” he says. “There’s such a sense of trust, and that really allows us to take chances.”

The first of two programs from NEGATIVE PRESS PROJECT’s collaboration with Friction Quartet, entitled ‘CYCLES I’ will include 12 compositions for release on Envelopmental Music Records, including Digital, CD, and Double Vinyl LP with Audiophile Vinyl cutting by Master Engineer Jeff Powell of Take Out Vinyl, Memphis, TN, targeted for distribution January 30, 2026.