Patrick Zimmerli Quartet - Shores Against Silence (2016)

This recording of New York saxophonist-composer Zimmerli's first quartet (Kevin Hays, piano; Larry Grenadier, bass; Tom Rainey, drums) went unreleased at the time. His first released recording was with his Ensemble (Songlines, 1995, followed by three other Songlines releases). Now he has returned to Shores and edited it for release in preparation for recording his new quartet, Clockworks, featuring The Bad Plus's Ethan Iverson (to be released on Songlines in 2017). Shores includes The Paw, a Zimmerli composition that won first prize in the first BMI/Thelonious Monk Institute competition. Like the other compositions on the record it draws on techniques that Zimmerli had analyzed in his studies of composers such as Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. You can hear these ideas in the ear-catching intervals and melodic turns, and they are also there in the complex rhythmic structures which the musicians have to negotiate. But this is not avant-garde experimentation for its own sake. Zimmerli's music is always strongly rooted in traditional forms, no matter how far he may stretch them. And even at its most contrapuntally dense or pointillistic it still makes use of traditional harmonies, which serve as beds for the players to improvise on. As with the best Third Stream music, he adds the sparkle and burnish of the new to the modern jazz tradition. Vibrant, lively and urbane, this music is perhaps even more relevant to jazz today than when it was made. Zimmerli's career as a composer of classical as well as classical/jazz hybrid music has gained him worldwide recognition. Since 2011 he has undertaken several recording projects with Nonesuch, composing or arranging music for Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Luciana Souza, and others, including an evening-length suite of music for Redman and strings to be released next year.