Ben van Gelder - Reprise (2013)

This quintet is a special discovery with a young, fresh and yet amazingly mature sound out of New York that is constructed with intelligence, along with something else that is felt in every moment of the music: an elemental desire to play. Here is music that swings, pulsates. It has lyrical elegance, carried along by a rhythmic density, transparency and groove that is never gratuitous. It is music that flows out of the mainstream of contemporary jazz, yet moves with such sovereign elegance that what immediately stands out is its special position within that mainstream.