Rudy Royston

Rudy Royston, first-call drummer with Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas, J.D. Allen, Rudresh Mahanthappa and a host of others, is proud to present DAY, his fifth release for Greenleaf Music. DAY is the second outing from Flatbed Buggy, the adventurous, sonically varied small group that Royston premiered on the acclaimed 2018 album of that name. Marked by the low-register richness of John Ellis on bass clarinet and Hank Roberts on cello, the tonal subtlety and harmonic depth of Gary Versace on accordion and the virtuosic authority of Joe Martin on bass, the band debuted with a musical evocation of Royston’s youth spent in rural Texas. On DAY, with the same lineup intact, Royston captures the turbulent emotional landscape of a day under quarantine.

“This record is a little more aggressive than the first,” Royston says, remarking on what he calls the “dusty” sound of Flatbed Buggy and the comparatively swinging DAY. “I’m playing a little more aggressively because the scenes I’m portraying lend themselves to that. The scenes on the first record are all outdoors so you want to feel that space and air and dust. The scenes on this one, I was inside the whole time.”

Widely praised for its unusual textures and tone colors (“it’s never really a ‘drummer’s record’,” Royston comments), Flatbed Buggy has grown even more cohesive as a unit, and Royston was keen to exploit its resources in full. “They’re all such great composers in this band — I’d be an idiot not to have them write for this!” To that end, Martin’s “Limeni Village” (named for a seaside villa in southern Greece) and Roberts’ enigmatic vamp-based closing track “A.M. Hours” broaden the Flatbed Buggy sound and concept. “I can’t wait to see what John and Gary write for future projects,” Royston enthuses.

Royston’s pieces are alive with melody, rhythmic and polyphonic motion, and improvisational energy. Each carries a specific association to a time of day, from “Morning” at 7am to “Look to the Hills” at noon, from “The Mokes” at 2pm to the straightforwardly named “5:30 Strut” and “Time to Sleep.”

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