The Squid's Ear Magazine


Helias, Mark / Tom Rainey / Tony Malaby: The Signal Maker (Intakt)

Double bass player Mark Helias leads his Open Loose trio, founded in 1996 and currently comprised of Tom Rainey on drums and Tony Malaby on tenor sax, taking Helias' compositions and reworking them live until they become the dozen magnificent pieces recorded on this album: a diverse, flexible and creative set of approaches to jazz and free improvisation.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Mark Helias-double bass

Tom Rainey-drums

Tony Malaby-tenro saxophone


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UPC: 7640120192457

Label: Intakt
Catalog ID: ITK245
Squidco Product Code: 24145

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2015
Country: Switzerland
Packaging: Jewel Case
Recorded at Acoustic Recording, Brooklyn, New York, on July 22nd, 2014, by Michael Brorby.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Celebrated bassist Mark Helias brings his all-star Open Loose trio back to the studio where compositions are reimagined, and heavy doses of improvisation are devised with a whole lot of cunningness. With these 13 pieces, the band infuses changeable and buoyantly rendered grooves, ideas, and detours, highlighted by the respective musicians' signature styles and striking intuitiveness. It's a manifold program that projects a sense of adventure via off-kilter deviations, gobs of counterpoint and a flock of shrewdly conceptualized twists and turns.

Helias' dual purpose attack is a prominent staple of this rapidly moving presentation. He contrasts saxophonist Tony Malaby in conjunction with drummer Tom Rainey's famously unique approach to drumming. Once again, Rainey's slap, dap and darting hits merge the structural components with off-center backbeats, sweeping fills, darting accents and rumbling, polyrhythmic breakouts. Yet as they say in the sport of boxing, styles make fights, and on this album stylistic tendencies and implementations add icing to the cake.

Ideas abound with creative minds on the loose. Variety is also a key factor, whether the band is bopping to a frothy, mid-tempo pulse on "Vocalise," or burning the midnight oil on the hard-hitting "Soliloquy." Nonetheless, many of these works feature Malaby's snaking and fiery lines as he toggles between the inside and outside jazz realm. But on "End Point," they delve into a subliminal motif and build steam, partly due to Rainey's crashing cymbals and pummeling rolls across the toms. Moreover, Helias' corpulent lines spring the group into an odd-metered funk groove, as Malaby builds tension with rough-hewn phrasings interwoven with temperate diversions.

The musicians generate warmth along with frisky, up-tempo swing and bop metrics while also bursting at the seams on the muscular and spiraling thematic developments, heard during "Motoric." And the final piece "Initialize," casts a brooding atmospheric, tinted with the bassist's scratchy arco-lines, leading to the trio's unorthodox sound-sculpting escapades. Hence, The Signal Maker hits the mark from a 360-degree realm of possible jazz-centric applications and broadly envisioned concepts, derived from the musicians collective experiences and lofty artistic motivations."-Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz


Get additional information at All About Jazz

Artist Biographies

"Mark Helias is a renowned bassist, composer and producer who has performed throughout the world for more than four decades with some of the most important and innovative musicians in Jazz and Improvised Music including Don Cherry, Edward Blackwell, Anthony Davis, Dewey Redman, Anthony Braxton, Abbey Lincoln, Cecil Taylor, and Uri Caine among many others. A prolific composer, Helias has written music for two feature films as well as chamber pieces and works for large ensemble and big band. His orchestra piece "Stochasm" was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in June of 2011. Twelve recordings of his music have been released since 1984, his latest being "The Signal Maker" on the Intakt label. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and SIM (School for Improvisational Music) in Brookyn, NY."

-Mark Helias Website (http://www.markhelias.com)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Thomas "Tom" Rainey (born 1957, Santa Barbara, California) is an American drummer.

After attending Berklee College of Music he moved to New York in 1979. He has played with American jazz saxophonist and composer Tim Berne, and also with Nels Cline, Fred Hersch, Tony Malaby, Tom Varner, Drew Gress, Kenny Werner, Mark Helias, and Simon Nabatov. A prolific session musician, he has appeared on close to eighty recordings over a career spanning over 25 years.

He released his own first album, Pool School (Clean Feed), in 2010."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Rainey)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Tony Malaby (born January 12, 1964 in Tucson, Arizona) is a jazz tenor saxophonist. Malaby moved to New York City in 1995 and has played with several notable jazz groups, including Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Paul Motian's Electric Bebop Band, Mark Helias's Open Loose, Fred Hersch's Trio + 2 and Walt Whitman project, and bands led by Mario Pavone, Chris Lightcap, Bobby Previte, Tom Varner, Marty Ehrlich, Angelica Sanchez, Mark Dresser, and Kenny Wheeler. Other collaborators have included Tom Rainey, Christian Lillinger, Ben Monder, Eivind Opsvik, Nasheet Waits, and Michael Formanek. His first album as a co-leader was Cosas with Joey Sellers."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Malaby)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. The Signal Maker 3:14

2. Ca Vous Gene 4:23

3. Largesse 3:02

4. Post Post 6:35

5. Vocalise 6:06

6. Soliloquy 4:17

7. End Point 6:31

8. Brothers 5:04

9. Fast Feast 2:57

10. Motoric 4:35

11. Temoine 3:06

12. You'll Never Guess 4:21

13. Initialize 6:20

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Trio Recordings
Intakt

Search for other titles on the label:
Intakt.


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