We realize we’re a little late to the punch, but if you haven’t already put the finishing touches on your 2010 year-end lists for jazz or other eclectic non-mainstream music, please consider the wonderful projects we’ve worked on in one way or another this past year. 

I would like to acknowledge all of you in the media and the industry for helping us make 2010 another successful year for Fully Altered Media. And of course we couldn’t do it without our amazing clients, listed below. 

I would also like to especially acknowledge former staffer Stephen Buono, all-around utility man Nick Venti and my new assistant Maribel Gil, who recently joined the Fully Altered team part-time, as well as day-to-day helpers Russ Flynn, Andy McGhie and Will Martina.

If you haven’t yet finished your year-end Top 10 or Top 20 or Top 50 lists, please consider the albums below. I hope that my eclecticism and open ears will continue to show through in the music we send your way.

To a Healthy & Productive 2011 and Beyond,
Matt Merewitz & Maribel Gil

Here are all the records we worked in 2010 for your consideration (in chronological order by release date):

Dave Rempis & Frank Rosaly Cyrillic (482 Music)

Colorist A Square White Lie (482 Music)

Sam Sadigursky The Words Project III: Miniatures (New Amsterdam)

Steve Colson Trio The Untarnished Dream (Silver Sphinx)

Thomas Savy French Suite (Plus Loin)

Dan Weiss Trio Timshel (Sunnyside)

Allison Miller BOOM TIC BOOM (Foxhaven)

Nels Cline Singers Initiate (Cryptogramophone)

Adam Rudolph & Ralph Jones Yeyi (Meta)

Adam Rudolph & Yusef Lateef Towards the Unknown (Meta)

Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things Stories & Negotiations (482 Music)

Jacky Terrason Push (Concord)

The Claudia Quintet Royal Toast (Cuneiform)

Pete Robbins sILENT Z – Live (Hate Laugh Music)

Ideal Bread Transmit: Vol. 2 of the Music of Steve Lacy (Cuneiform)

David Weiss & Point of Departure Snuck in (Sunnyside)

Rafi Malkiel Water (Tzadik)

Barry Harris Live in Rennes (Plus Loin)

Billy Bang Prayer for Peace (TUM)

Vijay Iyer Solo (ACT)

Blue Cranes Observatories (Self-released)

Eddie Gomez & Cesarius Alvim Forever (Plus Loin)

Rudresh Mahanthappa & Bunky Green Apex (Pi)

Kellylee Evans Nina (Plus Loin)

Nels Cline DIRTY BABY (Cryptogramophone)

Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly Featuring Roscoe Mitchell Empathetic Parts (482 Music)

Scott Amendola Trio Lift (Sazi)

Dan Tepfer Five Pedals Deep (Sunnyside)

The Dymaxion Quartet Sympathetic Vibrations (Self-released)

Jason Stein’s Locksmith Isidore Three Kinds of Happiness (Not Two)

Jerome Sabbagh I Will Follow You (Bee Jazz)

Look for some excellent new projects for January and beyond from:

•    Trumpeter Taylor Haskins to release new album Recombination on Nineteen-Eight Records in February 2011
•    Debut album, Steampunk Serenade by Honey Ear Trio Featuring Erik Lawrence, Rene Hart & Allison Miller to be released in March 2011
•    & much much more

For more information, contact Matt Merewitz at Fully Altered Media/
matt@fullyaltered.com / 215-629-6155

]]> http://fullyaltered.com/fa/2010/11/22/fully-altered-media-2010-the-year-in-review-2/feed/ 0 http://fullyaltered.com/fa/2010/03/04/the-claudia-quintet-releases-5th-album-royal-toast-on-cuneiform-records-may-18-2010/ http://fullyaltered.com/fa/2010/03/04/the-claudia-quintet-releases-5th-album-royal-toast-on-cuneiform-records-may-18-2010/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:02:47 +0000 Matt http://fullyaltered.com/fa/?p=940 Composer/Drummer John Hollenbeck Continues Prolific Recording Period
With Fifth Claudia Quintet Album, Royal Toast,
Due May 18, 2010 on Cuneiform Records

cover art for Royal Toast

On their fifth CD, Royal Toast, The Claudia Quintet raise a glass in salute to their regal muse with a set of new music fit for a king – albeit one with more refined tastes and open mind than your average monarch.

If a round table seems a wholly appropriate setting for this egalitarian ensemble (with an extra place setting this time out), theirs is as much Algonquin as Camelot, renowned for their sophisticated wit as well as their sharply-honed musical jousting.

As composer/leader John Hollenbeck points out, the title might also sound a bit “silly” – but there’s something in its odd incongruity that exemplifies the band’s one-of-a-kind sound.

“I like toast,” Hollenbeck explains with characteristically laconic humor, “and I noticed that if you put ‘royal’ in front of something, it seems elevated.”

The Claudia Quintet has similarly been finding the majestic in the mundane (or vice versa) for more than a dozen years. Nowhere is that more evident than on Royal Toast, where Hollenbeck began by collecting song titles found in often unlikely sources, divorcing them from their original context, and devising music inspired by these evocative phrases.

Hollenbeck’s compositions somehow conjure raucous beauty from dizzying complexity, enticing the emotions with lilting melodies or irresistible grooves while engaging the cerebral side in a surreptitious workout. The music marries jazz, new music, post-rock – but no laundry list of influences is quite sufficient to describe their iconoclastic sound. Suffice it to say, you can feel secure bringing your hipster nephew and your math professor along to a gig, and everyone will go home happy.

Of course, no one could pull off such a a trompe l’oreille without a well-honed ensemble, and the Claudia Quintet has, through intensive collaboration since their 1997 debut, developed a language all their own. The music can best – perhaps only – be defined by the individuals who create it – Hollenbeck on drums, Drew Gress (Tim Berne, Ravi Coltrane, Fred Hersch) on bass, Matt Moran (Slavic Soul Party, Mat Maneri, Ellery Eskelin) on vibraphone, Ted Reichman (Anthony Braxton, Marc Ribot, Paul Simon) on accordion, and Chris Speed (Bloodcount, Yeah No, Human Feel) on clarinet and tenor sax.

As attuned as the Quintet have become to each other, they’re each remarkably attuned to themselves, as Hollenbeck discovered while recording the CD. Bridging several of the pieces on the album are short improvised interludes in which each member plays a short improvised duet with himself – unbeknownst to them until the tracks were in the can. While they sound as if each side of the mirror is reacting to the other, they were actually played separately and married after the fact.

“I didn’t know if it was going to work, so I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it,” Hollenbeck admits. “And I couldn’t believe it because each one just worked fabulously. It was totally unbelievable how they breathed in the same places – Drew even has a rest in the same spot. I think the result is better, actually, than if I had asked them to react to their solos. That might have been a little artificial.”

The quintet is here supplemented by pianist Gary Versace, a longtime collaborator of Hollenbeck’s (including the composer’s Large Ensemble and in the Refuge Trio along with vocalist Theo Bleckmann).

“Gary and I have very similar aesthetics,” Hollenbeck says, “so what he plays is exactly what I would I be doing if I could play piano really well. Gary has a very composerly approach, so he’s very sensitive to the music and tries to make his part sound composed even when it’s not.”

The addition of Versace means that half of the band is now essentially playing percussive instruments, giving Hollenbeck more opportunity than ever to follow his polyrhythmic muse – which emerges most fully on the gleefully intricate title track. But the album begins not with force but with lush intoxication. “Crane Merit” sets an unexpectedly atmospheric mood, enveloping the listener with an idyllic warmth.

Introduced by a Hollenbeck solo that gradually builds into funky propulsion, “Keramag” is the album’s toe-tappingest tune, densely wrought and utterly infectious. It and “Zurn” have the titles with the least concrete associations; the latter is a through-composed piece that generates considerable tension through an insistent drum/piano figure that is thoroughly dispelled by its ethereal finale.

“Sphinx”, on the other hand, brings very distinct associations to mind, which Hollenbeck followed through Egypt to African rhythmic influences. The word “Standard” crops up twice, and in each case the composer took this as a cue to use jazz as a leaping-off point, penning an abstracted ballad with “Ideal Standard” and a fractured anthem on “American Standard.”

The album closes with the elegiac “For Frederick Franck”, an homage to the Dutch-born painter, sculptor and author who died in 2006 at the age of 97. Hollenbeck’s personal connection to the artist comes via a sculpture park in upstate New York that Franck designed and where Hollenbeck proposed to his wife. But Franck’s expansive philosophy is also representative of Hollenbeck’s boundary-blurring approach to genre.

“The meaning of life is to see,” Franck espoused in his work, and the Claudia Quintet approach music with eyes wide open.

For more information please contact Matt Merewitz at Fully Altered Media (matt@fullyaltered.com or 347-527-2527).