PASCAL LE BOEUF
Hailed as “sleek, new” and “hyper-fluent” by The New York Times, GRAMMY-nominated pianist and composer Pascal Le Boeuf continues to blaze a trail of forward-thinking creativity with Ritual Being, featuring works originally commissioned for Shattered Glass and the Friction Quartet. In realizing these bold, hybrid forms of new music and jazz, Le Boeuf surrounds himself with like-minded jazz players of the highest order, including bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Justin Brown, who complete the trio nucleus — known as Pascal’s Triangle — at the heart of the project. Alto saxophonist Remy Le Boeuf, Pascal’s identical twin and co-founder of Le Boeuf Brothers, appears alongside tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel on numerous tracks. Additional strings and flute complete the sonic picture in a program of extraordinary rhythmic urgency, contrapuntal density and breathtaking imagination.
In 2015, after a decade on the New York jazz scene, Le Boeuf took a turn, enrolling at Princeton University to pursue a Ph.D. in music composition. Though he had been a composer for many years prior, Princeton would lead him down a different path than the one he had been pursuing as he began engaging with the exciting and often jazz-adjacent new music community in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.
“I went to Princeton because I was interested in what the people from that community were researching and exploring in their music, such as professors Steve Mackey, Donnacha Dennehy, Juri Seo, and graduate composers Florent Ghys, Anna Pidgorna, and Eliott Cole. I was beginning to work within the same spaces as the graduate composers, so joining the graduate composition department was a way to further pursue that artistic direction.”
However, unlike most of his peers, his early compositions for notation-based performers came from his explorations in electronic production, including “W.A.I.T.T.”, composed for Justin Brown, “Girls” for RighteousGirls, and “Alkaline” from the Le Boeuf Brothers’ GRAMMY-nominated 2016 collaboration with JACK Quartet, imaginist. Additionally, “Obliquely Wrecked,” from this recording, was developed prior to enrolling at Princeton through electronic experimentation, though he later added Brown on drums.
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