Criss Cross Jazz new release May 2022

Criss Cross Jazz new release May 2022

CRISS 1406 CD  OPUS 5 - SWING ON THIS -

With Swing On This, the all-star quintet Opus 5 presents its fifth Criss Cross album, and first since 2015, when Criss Cross released Tickle (Criss 1383), which itself was preceded – in backwards chronology – by Progression (Criss 1369), Pentasonic (Criss 1351), and Introducing Opus 5 (Criss 1339), each recorded a year apart. The “all star” sobriquet is not an exaggeration – the collective discographies of trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, pianist David Kikoski, bassist Boris Kozlov, and drummer Donald Edwards, all international first-callers, total more than 30 Criss Cross leader dates.

 

Opus 5 gestated in 2010, when Sipiagin and Blake, brainstorming over drinks at the bar in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport during a between-flights layover, decided to organize a new band to play original music that did not reference the music of Charles Mingus that they’d been playing together for many years in the Mingus Big Band, which Kozlov has music-directed since 2004. They recruited Kikoski, Kozlov and Edwards, each a colleague of long standing in the MBB. Edwards suggested the name, signifying on Kozlov’s big band arrangement of Mingus’ Opus 4 that all members admired. They contacted Criss Cross proprietor Gerry Teekens, who knew them all, and green-lit that first album in 2011. Through the next six years, “the five bandleaders and five sidemen,” as Kozlov puts it, enhanced their already considerable chemistry on periodic tours in Europe and Russia, developing material that they documented from one date to the next.

 

During the seven-year gap that separates Tickle from Swing On This, the members found fewer opportunities to play. Everyone was busy with other projects. Covid-19 made it problematic to convene. Blake and Sipiagin relocated to Europe. Then, last summer, when Blake scheduled a trip in New York to conduct personal business, Opus 5 seized the opportunity to go in the studio to record eight pieces with engineer Mike Marciano. With a single brief rehearsal under their belt, they navigate the repertoire with fluent mutual intuition and deep commitment, as though they’d been probing it for months.

 

PREVIOUS OPUS 5 RELEASES

OTHER RECENT RELEASES

CRISS 1409 CD

Misha Tsiganov - Misha's Wishes -

Misha Tsiganov, who lived in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union until he emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, at 25, has never shied away from a challenge. That’s apparent from the levels of complexity that Tsiganov embeds in the 18 arrangements and 9 originals on his three prior Criss Cross albums – The Artistry of the Standard (Criss 1367), Spring Feelings (Criss 1384), and Playing With The Wind (Criss 1401).

 

Tsiganov’s latest, Misha’s Wishes, doesn’t eschew technical complexity. But the feel of this sophisticated, emotionally nuanced program – performed by old friends trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Donald Edwards, themselves leaders of multiple Criss Cross dates, with whom Tsiganov feels such simpatico that he once postponed a recording session until all were available – is different than its predecessors.

CRISS 1408 CD

David Binney - A Glimple Of The Eternal -

The tenth Criss Cross album with David Binney’s imprimatur, A Glimpse of the Eternal, is, he says, “completely different than anything I’ve ever done – chilled out, an honest and pleasant vibe, nothing too complicated or intense.”

 

If that self-description seems at odds with the intense, complex tonal personality that Binney has presented on his 30-album discography since 1990 ... well, that was his intention.

CRISS 1407 CD

Donald Edwards - The Color of US Suite -

Timing is everything, and as Donald Edwards continues to make recordings, we are able to hear the clarity of his development as a composer and artist. This recording The Color Of US Suite carries with it the total range in expressions of the freedom concept, the obsession with hope through the infatuation of dreams - the disappointment, anger, and love for the framing of our evolving paradigm from within the prism of democracy. Donald captures those gradations of condition in a high-minded representation of passion, delivered with high-skilled precision, and soulful highs that are as exciting to the gutbucket enthusiast as it is intriguing for the high-brow aficionado.

The Color Of US Suite signifies the idealism of being in pursuit, eye on the prize, and evince a passion for study, discipline and integrity required to handle this music’s greatest demands. Donald Edwards and fellow musicians Anthony Wonsey, Ben Wolfe, David Gilmore and Abraham Burton have succeeded, and we are edified all the more higher for them having done so. 

CRISS 1405 CD

David Gilmore - From Here To Here -

This release is a tribute to my father and our grandpa Gerry Teekens Sr, founder of Criss Cross Jazz who passed away October 31, 2019.

Jerry Teekens Jr, Bo Teekens, Amber Teekens.

The notion that nothing spurs the creative process like a deadline fully matches the back story of David Gilmore’s second album for Criss Cross, on which the 54-year-old guitar master navigates eight never-recorded compositions of both recent and older vintage, and a pair of well-wrought covers.