Chad Taylor Quintet - Smoke Shifter (2025) [Hi-Res]

Jazz is music of community, a continually developing social reflection on language and how it connects us creatively. Whether musicians or listeners, we are in constant, immediate conversation about history and development––taking the fractal fabrics of Armstrong, Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Coltrane, or Sun Ra, examining and rearranging them in order to create fresh structures. As the art critic Clement Greenberg said of modernism in his 1960 lecture “Modernist Painting,” “the essence... lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more fully in its area of competence.” These words speak to a dialogue, continually energized and made kinetic, whereby the meat of a form, its language, is in play with time and content. To bring this around to prolific drummer Chad Taylor’s sixth album as a leader, Smoke Shifter, the drummer offers the following: “I just enjoy creating new language, either as a side person or a leader––for me, that’s jazz. If there is such a thing as a definition, it’s the process of creating a new language with people” [my italics].

Chad Taylor - Drums
Jonathan Finlayson - trumpet
Bryan Rogers - Tenor Saxophone
Victor Vieira-Branco - vibraphone
Matt Engle - Bass