Richard Sears - Iron Year (2018)

Slow & Steady Records announces the release of Richard Sears’ fifth album, Iron Year. Richard Sears, Roman Filiu, Dayna Stephens, Bryan Carrott, Martin Nevin, Craig WeinribSears expands on the compositional palette from his previous album, Altadena, with new material written after moving to New York City in 2015, realized primarily for sextet. Iron Year takes its name from the Hart Crane poem, “To Brooklyn Bridge“, a meditation on human labor and aspiration.

“The achievement is seen in this fantastic bridge, and the way its splendor endures the harshness of weather, the hopelessness of night, and the cyclical mundanities of being a New Yorker,” says Sears. “That heavenliness is, in the case of the bridge, ‘vaulting the sea,’ cutting the night’s lamplight by its ‘rip-tooth,’ ‘forsaking our eyes’ in its grand assembly. At the risk of being strident, these words encourage us to aspire to something beyond ourselves, and thus ‘lend a myth to God’.”

Iron Year features saxophonists Roman Filiu and Dayna Stephens (both friends and mentors of Sears), vibraphonist Bryan Carrott (who Sears met through playing with the Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra in 2016), bassist Martin Nevin (a longtime collaborator), drummer Craig Weinrib (Henry Threadgill, Ravi Coltrane, and David Virelles) and Richard Sears on piano.