Now available: Apparent Distance (Firehouse 12 Records)
THB – cornet; Jim Hobbs – alto saxophone; Bill Lowe – bass trombone; Mary Halvorson – guitar; Ken Filiano – bass; Tomas Fujiwara – drums
“Thoughtfully tumultuous new album…It’s all seductively challenging, full of standout moments that nevertheless dissolve into the whole.” Nate Chinen, The New York Times
“Full of diversity and constant surprise…Bynum’s compositional language is his own.” Marc Medwin, Dusted
“It is both a thoroughly composed and an improvisational undertaking that swings as a conventional jazz sextet but challenges like a multi-directional chamber ensemble. Like Bynum himself, the music is not easily pigeonholed.” Mark Corroto, All About Jazz
“Brimming with circuitous melodies, modulating rhythms and dynamic transitions…Apparent Distance is a prime example of Bynum’s exemplary skills as a multifaceted artist and a captivating document of his flagship ensemble.” Troy Collins, Point of Departure
“Apparent Distance is a benchmark for methods that seek to move past the more recognizable conventions of the idiom. Efforts to incorporate sound craft, hewing close to nature sound metaphors, have rarely been this vivid.” Chris Rich, All About Jazz
“His mid-size group slowly smudges the lines between foreground and background as well as improv and composition. Throw the GPS out the window; not being able to pinpoint their position is a wonderful predicament to be in, if only for an hour or so. And damn, is some of this outcat action pretty.” Jim Macnie, Village Voice
“Apparent Distance is an excellently-realized set from Bynum and company that hooks deeply into the music’s legacy while looking forward with firm openness.” Clifford Allen, Paris Transatlantic
“Music that is both graceful and wild: Bynum’s intelligence provides the suite with an invisible architecture, which serves as a foundation for gorgeous improvisational flights.” Florence Wetzel, The Squid’s Ear
For the past six years, the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet has been Bynum’s primary working ensemble, releasing two albums and performing throughout the world, including headlining performances at Banlieues Bleues Festival (France), the Saalfelden Jazz Festival (Austria), Jazz Em Agosto (Portugal), Taktlos Festival (Switzerland), Kerava Festival (Finland), and the Vision Festival (NYC). The group’s 2007 debut, The Middle Picture (Firehouse 12 Records), was called “the shape of jazz to come” (Philip Clark, The Wire, UK), and “a measured, highly intelligent project that points the way forward for jazz as the decade wanes…four stars” (Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings). The 2008 follow-up, Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths (hatOLOGY Records) was similarly critically acclaimed, described as “a momentous and altogether brilliant album” (Chris May, AllAboutJazz.com) “one of the indispensable ensembles in modern jazz…five stars” (Thierry Lepin, Jazzman Magazine, France).
The latest iteration of the sextet adds Jim Hobbs (alto saxophone), Bill Lowe (bass trombone), and Ken Filiano (bass) to the core trio of the leader’s cornet with Mary Halvorson (guitar) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). Though Hobbs, Lowe, and Filiano are new to the group, their musical relationships with Bynum stretch back fifteen years and more. The ensemble brings together some of the finest musicians from the Boston and New York scenes, demonstrating a remarkable diversity of backgrounds and generations, with members of the group born in every decade from the 1940s to the ‘80s. Bynum received a 2010 New Jazz Works Commissioning Grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to write a book of original compositions for the sextet, resulting in the sextet’s newest CD: Apparent Distance, released on Firehouse 12 Records in November ’11.
BIOS
Best known for his long-time leadership of the Fully Celebrated Orchestra, Jim Hobbs also leads the Hobbetts and the big band The Brothers of Heliopolis, in addition to working with collectives like Story of Mankind and the Jazz Composer’s Alliance. In AllAboutJazz.com, Troy Collins describes him as “one of his generation’s most gifted altoists,” and The Boston Phoenix’s Jon Garelick writes “there’s no one with a more individual sound and conception than Hobbs: strangled and crying one minute, soft and bluesy the next, or just plain Johnny Hodges purdy.” Hobbs and Bynum have played together for over a decade in the FCO and the BOH; their interplay has been described by Ben Ratliff in The New York Times as “one of the special, mutually beneficial relationships in jazz.” A new trio recording with Hobbs, Bynum, and Mary Halvorson, AYCH, will be released in early ’12.
Bass trombonist and tubaist Bill Lowe has been a major force in the music world for over four decades as a performer, composer, producer, and educator. He has worked with many of the masters of African-American creative music, from musical legends like Frank Foster and Clark Terry, to the leaders of the avant-garde like Muhal Richard Abrams and Henry Threadgill, to under-heralded greats like Bill Barron and James ‘Jabbo’ Ware. Twenty years ago, Lowe took a fifteen-year-old Bynum under his musical wing; since that original mentorship the two have performed together in hundreds of gigs and countless contexts, including in Cecil Taylor’s Orchestra, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, the collective ensembles Paradigm Shift and The OtherTet, and ensembles under Lowe’s leadership like the Bill Lowe/Carl Atkins Big Band and Signifyin’ Natives.
The success of her acclaimed 2008 debut, Dragon’s Head (Firehouse 12 Records), led critics to call Mary Halvorson “probably the most original jazz guitarist to emerge this decade” (Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader) and “the most impressive guitarist of her generation” (Troy Collins, AllAboutJazz.com). In addition to her trio, which also recently expanded to a quintet on the recent recording Saturn Sings (Firehouse 12 Records), she co- leads a chamber music duo with violist Jessica Pavone and the avant-rock project, People, and also performs in groups led by Tim Berne, Curtis Hasselbring, Tony Malaby, Myra Melford, Jason Moran, Marc Ribot, and Elliot Sharp, among many others. Bynum and Halvorson have been regular collaborators since 2004; in addition to playing in Bynum’s Trio and Sextet and the collective quartet The Thirteenth Assembly, they have toured the world and recorded extensively with Anthony Braxton in trio, quartet, quintet, septet, and 12+1tet formations.
Bassist Ken Filiano has been described as a “creative virtuoso,” a “master of technique,” and “a paradigm of that type of artist who can play anything in any context and make it work, simply because he puts the music first and leaves peripheral considerations behind.” He leads his own quartet (featured on the recent Clean Feed album Dreams from a Clown Car) and has worked with countless artists, including Bobby Bradford, Nels Cline, Vinny Golia, Joseph Jarman, Warne Marsh, and Roswell Rudd. Bynum and Filiano have played together in Jason Kao Hwang’s Edge since 2004, in addition to performances and recordings with the Nate Wooley/Taylor Ho Bynum Quartet, Bill Dixon’s Tapestries for Small Orchestra project, and Anthony Braxton’s opera Trillium E.
Drummer Tomas Fujiwara “works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting. He has a way of spreading out the center of a pulse while setting up a rigorous scaffolding of restraint…smartly informed and firmly moored” (Nate Chinen, The New York Times). His first recording as a leader, Actionspeak with his group The Hook-Up, was released last fall on 482 Music. He also regularly performs with a host of progressive artists, including Matt Bauder, Amir ElSaffar, Mary Halvorson, Ideal Bread, Red Baraat, Matana Roberts, and Matthew Welch. Bynum and Fujiwara have played together in dozens of groups on countless gigs since they first met as teenagers growing up around Boston; they have released two highly acclaimed albums as a duo (2007’s True Events and 2010’s Stepwise), in addition to their work together in Bynum’s Trio and Sextet, The Thirteenth Assembly, and Positive Catastrophe.
