Tony Malaby, tenor & soprano saxophone
Tom Rainey, drums
Michael Sarin, drums & percussion
Drew Gress, acoustic bass
New York saxophonist Tony Malaby's Mexican-American background and experience playing both inside and outside bring a subtly different flavor to his second record as leader. Apparitions is even more open and exploratory than his debut, Sabino (which made the NY Times' and Philadelphia City Paper's top ten jazz lists for 2000). The process began a couple of years ago when he performed several times with two drummers and loved it: “It's just the most comfortable couch, or like taking a warm bath, just being surrounded by that sound and falling into it." He soon knew who the band was going be; having played together a lot in various other combinations, they already had a shared vocabulary to build on. They worked with Tony's structural concepts more than with written-out compositions: “I decided to try to create platforms for my favorite .zones' that we'd developed or would hit on. So for example, a multi-layered zone where the four of us are each playing in our own pulse or dimension in time, or a very transparent zone where it's cymbals/ mallets/brushes and I'm playing flute-like and Drew's playing arco. And the question is: how am I going to get this into a composition, how am I going to structure it?"
Throughout Apparitions, freedom and form are dual aspects of the music's evolution. Cutting-edge jazz typically blurs the distinction between composition and improvisation, but seldom are the results so intuitive yet coherent - sinuous group elaborations of uncanny dexterity, the often dense textures retaining a striking clarity. The whole record feels like one extended suite exploring forms and moods on some knife-edge between passion and abstraction. “A big part of the aesthetic is that the composition is hidden, and the improv is equally hidden
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