Samuel Blaser

“Pieces of Old Sky” (CF151CD)

Clean Feed Records

We get so used to thinking that space is the silent part which music passes through. Like a blank canvas, where the paint does all the work.

Samuel Blaser, a jazz trombonist from Switzerland, figures the silence of empty space can be an important part of the music. This is not a concept most American jazzers could arrive at on their own.

Jazz in the U.S attracts attention by being played louder, faster or with more anxiety. It is an unspoken rule of the marketplace. Sometimes a brave soloist can get some notice by playing sweetly, but that doesn’t happen too often.

Blaser is pulling out all the stops on his imagination. Working with Todd Neufeld, guitar, Thomas Morgan, bass, and Tyshawn Sorey, drums, Blaser constructs three-dimensional tone poems that hang in the air like elegant chandeliers. They don’t swing so much as they shimmer, pulsing rather than moving through space on rails of liner lyricism.

Thus, listening is more of a concert experience rather than a foot-tapping one. Each of the seven original pieces creates its own atmosphere. All are so subjective they will have different meanings for each person.

If there is a unifying element, it is the unique viewpoint of the quartet to always sound mysterious. Whether the composition seems ceremonial or processional, or even celebratory, Blaser never stops implying there is something more that is hidden just beneath the surface.

This is a recording for the listener who appreciates classical music as much as jazz, a person who can hear structures being built from chord progressions. And who can give substance to silence, imagining glass blocks of emptiness supporting creativity by artists using the spontaneity of improvisation like pointing a flashlight into the darkness.

Sample the subjectivity for yourself at www.cleanfeed-records.com