- "Fox's band has the Modern Jazz Quartet's poise and John Coltrane Quartet's power"
-- Keven Lowenthal, Globe Correspondent
The following Compact Disc is available exclusively from Leonellis Music...
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DONAL FOX QUARTET LIVE: SCARLATTI JAZZ SUITE PROJECT
All Donal Fox compositions published by Leonells Music/BMI Personnel: Donal Fox, piano; Warren Wolf, vibraphone; John Lockwood, double bass; Terri Lyne Carrington, drums Record Label: Leonellis Music Digitally Recorded Live to 2-track Recording Engineer: Alan Mattes Digital Editing: Alan Mattes Producer: Donal Fox Photo Credits: Lou Jones Art Direction: Daren Bascome, Proverb Limited Total time: 70:45 |
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Donal Fox's jazz plays upon many traditions
-- By Kevin Lowenthal, Globe Correspondent June 13, 2006
Composer/pianist Donal Fox has forged a unique amalgam of jazz, Latin American, and classical music. Past projects have focused on Johann Sebastian Bach, but the centerpiece of Saturday night's Regattabar performance was a jazz suite incorporating the music of Domenico Scarlatti.
Fox was accompanied by vibraphonist Stefon Harris, bassist John Lockwood , and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. This instrumentation inevitably brings the Modern Jazz Quartet to mind, but Fox's band married that group's cool poise with the power and momentum of the John Coltrane Quartet.
The opening number was based on an Astor Piazzolla tango. Rather than presenting the usual string of solos, piano and vibraphone engaged in a fluid, improvisatory dialogue. Lockwood and Carrington's bass and drums provided active but essentially supportive background for the friendly jousting of Fox and Harris.
The second number was Fox's Inventions in Blue, which drew from Bach's Two-Part Invention No. 4 in D Minor. It began as a rapid, African-sounding vamp, spelled by lyrical piano chords that floated over the pulsating rhythm. Harris's swinging, bluesy solo was bouyed by Lockwood's walking bass and Carrington's urgent ride cymbal.
Then Bach's invention was introduced, played faithfully at first by piano and vibes. But Fox and Harris began stretching out as the African rhythm returned, revealing that the initial vamp had indeed been based upon a cadence of Bach's. With the full band's headlong velocity re established, Fox and Harris played intense percussive patterns that interlocked in an exciting rhythmic counterpoint.
Next came Bach's Fugue No. 23 in B Major, set to a Latin beat and building to a two-fisted Fox solo. A sensitive rendition of Horace Silver's ballad Peace was dedicated to Eric Jackson's 25 years as a DJ on WGBH.
The Scarlatti Suite was structured similary to Inventions in Blue, but built to even greater heights. Its rythms shifted from African to tango to a suggestion of ska. Carrington soloed with spell binding counter rhythms over an almost frighteningly intense full-band vamp.
After a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd, the band encored with an affecting rendition of Schumann's gentle Davidsbundler No. 2, Op. 6.
About Donal Fox and "INVENTIONS IN BLUE"
Donal Fox is of Judeo-Panamanian background which accounts, no doubt, for his knowledge of classical music as well as Black American music. His music is unlike that of anyone else, while at the same time it evokes McCoy Tyner, Art Tatum, the intensity of Coltrane and of the blues, shades of Bach and Cuban music. In other words, his compositions have an inherent solidity, not like music which fluctuates to fit current fashions. In some ways Donal Fox shows similarities with Marcus Roberts with whom he shares a taste for atmospherics and the blues. But what is extraordinary is Fox's mastery of stylistic digressions, moving from the classics to the blues, from free form to the tango, with a power and logic strongly reminiscent of Art Tatum.
The modernity of his music rests on the vitality and multiplicity of its roots, whose springs are always fresh. The expressiveness of stride resounding throughout, its musical richness mirroring the richness of all humanity. While some composers act audacious while regurgitating old goods, Fox makes us see the logic of unusual juxtapositions. He moves from incantation and rhythmic violence to playing a fluid free-form and giving us every variation, without the variations being the sole subject of his music. This is the royal road of jazz: invention, borrowing, the personality, curiosity and strength of an unchanging identity without artifice.
Fox has chosen musical partners who possess the same freedom, the same ease in passing from "inside" to "outside," from swing to a luminous free form. Yoron Israel reacts instinctively to the most subtle request, and John Lockwood overflows with contrapuntal ideas.
The tango ("tango" is in fact a Cuban bolero) is particularly well adapted to the personality of Donal Fox, since classical inspiration is wedded to a rhythmic sense, a synthesis parallel to that occurring on jazz. Fox easily weaves a whole from a variety of historical threads (listen to his "Bach's Soul Food" and "Bach Goes to New Orleans").
Invention in Blue: the title says it all. Fox develops his inventions based on the complex texture of the blues -- that brilliant emblem of the civilization of jazz.
-- Jean Szlamowicz
Jazz Hot Magazine (France)
January 2003