Click here to enter the contest
(Following Charnett Moffett at AAJ automatically enters you in the contest.)
Good luck!
Your Friends at Motema Music
About Charnett Moffett and Treasure
For musicians, compositions are precious reflections of the soul—aural snapshots of emotions, reflections and conceptions covering broad swaths of human expression and experience. Each offering allows the musician a new opportunity to communicate on varying wavelengths—conscious and subconscious, simple and complex, spiritual and intellectual. Over the course of a fascinating career that began at a very young age, the virtuosic Charnett Moffett has reached profound musical depths and expanded the possibilities of jazz composition and performance through his creative imagination using his instruments as his voice. His approach to music making and recording can be challenging and unorthodox. Yet the rewards for taking on those challenges are often awe-inspiring, revelatory—and can elevate mere songs to Treasure, the title of Charnett's second project for Motema Music and his eleventh as a leader.
Treasure offers a thematic yang to the yin of his critically acclaimed Motema debut, The Art of Improvisation, which came out in 2009. While Treasure shares the eclecticism and some of the Asian and Middle Eastern influences of The Art of Improvisation, the newer release palpably concentrates an emphasis on the swing and pulse that has earned Moffett standing ovations throughout his career as one of the most highly regarded bassists in jazz.
Moffett uses a three-pointed musical arsenal to express his distinct musicality on Treasure: his upright acoustic bass, his fretless electric bass and his electric piccolo bass. Each has its own sonic spectrum which he further expands through his virtuosic bow-tapping and hand plucking techniques, and through the use of a select bag of electronic tricks which allow his boundless imagination to find just the right tone and feeling for each bass in each song. His unorthodox and emotionally charged approach to jazz has earned Moffett high praise from fans and critics alike. “Charnett Moffett is an undisputed bass champion, a musician's musician." remarked Audiophile Audition Magazine. “His playing on electric and acoustic basses has a grounded, vocal quality," was the word from All About Jazz, while Details Magazine, in a rare jazz review commented “One of jazz's top instrumentalists, Charnett Moffett is a hypnotic performer ... [his] acidy version of “'The Star Spangled Banner' would have made Jimi Hendrix weep." In fact Moffett has built a career on using the bass in a much wider capacity than virtually any other bassist in jazz. “I remember as a youngster playing improvised solo bass for family and friends. This allowed me to express my creative abilities using the bass as a lead instrument from early on," Charnett explains. “It wasn't until I got older that I realized the bass was primarily a support instrument! Not knowing this allowed me to develop my voice as a bassist more fully than I might have otherwise."
(Continue reading here.)
For more information contact All About Jazz.
