Noah Garabedian - Consider The Stars Beneath Us (2022) [Hi-Res]

Honing the quartet aesthetic of his 2020 release Where Fables Meet, bassist and composer Noah Garabedian issues the spellbinding Consider the Stars Beneath Us, with a moving epigraph from the leader: “Dedicated to my father Pater George Garabedian Պետրոս Գեվորգ Կարապետյան who was my biggest fan.”

In the album notes Garabedian writes: “My father passed away in the early days of the COVID- 19 pandemic, but my music is about more than just his death and his memory; this album is neither a eulogy nor a memorial. It is a celebration of his life and his spirit, as well as all the celestial bodies who continue to guide us through life.”

In an expansion of the quartet framework, Garabedian enlists longtime friend and producer Samuel Adams, the Bay Area-based electro-acoustic new music composer and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, whose interventions in sound design and effects transform the otherwise acoustic quartet music in the subtlest of ways. Leading from the acoustic bass in the company of tenor/soprano saxophonist Dayna Stephens, pianist Carmen Staaf and drummer Jimmy Macbride, Garabedian aims, with Adams’ active collaboration, to present the fullest picture of his artistic journey to date.

“Samuel has helped me develop as a person and an artist in ways that I could not have done on my own,” Garabedian declares. “Also, most of the contemporary music I listen to today is heavily influenced by electronics, so releasing a purely acoustic album would have been misleading as to who I am as an artist right now. I’m inspired by artists who are unapologetically themselves, and for me now, it’s all about finding balance between acoustic and electronic sounds.”

On his previous album Where Fables Meet, Garabedian chose his brother, formidable tenor saxophonist Raffi Garabedian, to interpret a set of compositions full of melodic imagination, unveiling a quartet conception that promisingly set the stage for Consider the Stars Beneath Us. On this album, Dayna Stephens — sideman with Kenny Barron, Al Foster, Gerald Clayton and many more as well as leader of his own acclaimed projects — holds the tenor seat (and plays soprano sax on “Salt Point” and “Petty Thieves”) with characteristic controlled fire. Adams’ suggestive electronic effects weave in and out unobtrusively, adding mysterious elements and timbres and transporting the music to another plane. Adams also contributes the one piece not by Garabedian, the dizzyingly intricate “Pendulum for NG,” which the leader describes as “a short tune made of expanding and contracting lines, off-kilter hits, and unresolved, rubbery harmonies, all of which swing back and forth around a single pivot point.”

The dreamlike opener, “RR,” is Garabedian’s homage to Ralph Alessi and Ravi Coltrane, two mentors and major influences, with a powerful and virtuosic unaccompanied bass solo midway through. “Salt Point” draws inspiration partly from the Gnawa musical tradition of Morocco (Staaf’s breathtaking piano solo is a highlight), while “Petty Thieves” finds its model of interwoven melodies in the madrigals of the Renaissance/Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi. The closing “Alice” pays tribute to the late Alice Coltrane, with Adams’ electronic treatments indirectly conjuring the harp-like sounds of Coltrane herself.

“We are confronted with different paths daily,” Garabedian writes in his notes. “The choices that we make can be beneficial, risky, anxiety-filled, or exciting, among other feelings. Consider The Stars Beneath Us is a reminder that there are alternatives to our initial reactions; there is more than what is immediately visible.... To ‘consider the stars beneath us’ also means to recognize the intrinsic humanity in everyone. As a child of two families scarred by genocide and displacement, I try my best to remember that our pasts do not define us, and to understand the world around me through my music.”

A bassist and composer of Armenian descent, Noah Garabedian is co-leader of the collaborative trio Ember, which released its Sunnyside debut No One Is Any One (featuring piano great Orrin Evans) in 2021. He debuted as a leader in 2014 with the sextet album Big Butter and the Egg Men (BJU Records). He has performed and toured with Ravi Coltrane, Ralph Alessi, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Andy Milne, Kris Davis, Josh Roseman, Nir Felder and more. He is a 2022 Calouste Gulbenkian In View Grant recipient and a 2021 Fellow for Creative Armenia/AGBU. In October 2020 he premiered a commission from the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College, entitled “The Tragedy of Hate.” In November 2016 he received a Fulbright Specialist Grant to teach jazz at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

Noah Garabedian - composer and bass
Dayna Stephens - saxophone
Carmen Staaf - piano
Jimmy Macbride - drums