recording – Brad Cheeseman

The Tide Turns is now available! You can listen to and purchase the album over at Bandcamp.

The album recently debuted at #1 on Earshot!’s National Jazz Charts, and has been receiving steady praise in reviews:

“The Tide Turns … shows incremental growth from a musician whose Brad Cheeseman Group debut already presented a fully formed artist delivering fully formed ideas and an advanced bass technique that falls somewhere between Steve Swallow and Jaco Pastorius. … The evolving Brad Cheeseman Group brings Cheeseman’s compositions to life in a contemporary setting that isn’t likely to get dated because of this band’s tightness, which often starts with the bass player himself.” – S. Victor Aaron, Something Else! Reviews

and

[The Tide Turns] is a beautiful collection of sophisticated and tasteful modern jazz written and performed by a group that are nothing short of masters at their crafts. … The entire band stands out for their musicianship, taste, and improvisation as they each seamlessly flow through the excellently written songs from Cheeseman. … The Tide Turns stands as a record which perfectly captures the jazz of today, while still challenging the boundaries of the style.” – Gerrod Harris, Canadian Beats

After a successful CD release at Toronto’s Rex Hotel, this music will be hitting the road for a short Quebec tour. Check out the Calendar to find out more.

“Figurants, the wraith says they’re called, these surreally mute background presences whose presence really revealed that the camera, like any eye, has a perceptual corner, a triage of who’s important enough to be seen and heard v. just seen.”
– Infinite Jest, pg. 835

Receiving acclaim for his work as both bassist and composer, Brad Cheeseman has been steadily positioning himself as a unique voice in Canadian jazz. Considered by some to be “one of Canada’s bright new jazz composer-artists,” his music has been described as having the “subtleties of the best modern jazz music” with a strong emphasis on musical storytelling. On Figurants, Cheeseman brings this idea full circle with his most ambitious work yet: a series of new compositions based on David Foster Wallace’s landmark novel Infinite Jest.

Joined by Brad Cheeseman Group alumni Lorenzo Castelli (drums) and Jeff LaRochelle (tenor sax & bass clarinet), as well as Kevin Stolz (piano), Colleen Allen (alto & soprano sax), and Aidan Sibley (trombone), Figurants explores various characters, chapters and themes from Wallace’s novel, using varying instrumentation and moods to set each scene. Whether it’s the urgent quartet performance on “Year of Glad” or the elegant complexity of “Scaling Mt. Dilaudid,” Figurants looks at both the themes and world of Wallace’s novel while recognizing their parallels in the world around us.

Selections from Figurants will be premiered at Spectrum Music’s upcoming “Literary Landscapes” concert.

1. Year of Glad (4:34)
2. The American Century as Seen Through a Brick (6:45)
3. The Wraith Himself (6:45)
4. Scaling Mt. Dilaudid (7:31)

FACTOR

Tag: recording

The Tide Turns now available!

Figurants EP – new music to be released Feb 1, 2016