Criss Cross Jazz new release April 2024

Gregory Groover’s Criss Cross debut, recorded on the Boston born-and-bred tenor saxophonist’s thirtieth birthday, is a tour de force. Joined by a bespoke sextet of his favorite players: Joel Ross, Matthew Stevens, Aaron Parks, Vicente Archer and Marcus Gilmore, all New York-based, Groover presents a recital of 11 original tone-parallels to family and friends, his intentions anticipated, illuminated and fulfilled by his gifted bandmates. Lovabye follows Groover’s formidable first full-length album.
 

During the lockdown, Groover had generated a group of “love songs and songs of people I love.” In spring 2023, he brought this music to Walter Smith III, who Groover had idolized as a teenager, and is now his friend and colleague at Berklee School of Music, their mutual alma mater, where Groover serves as Assistant Chair of the Ensemble Department. “I told Walter I’d like to play with some of my other heroes and peers,” Groover recalls. “He said, ‘What’s stopping you? The music is there.’ Luckily for me, everyone who I wanted to record with was available and happy to do it.”
 

“Greg’s composing supports how he plays,” Smith says. “He’s a thematic musician, whose playing very much relates to the song. He plays with a lot of energy, and he leads with that. The heart is the most important thing – the direction and motion of what he plays is where he really feels.

The album was recorded August 16, 2023 at GSI Studios in New York City, and edited, mixed and mastered by Mike Marciano at Systems Two.

“This was a dream band to write for and play with,” alto saxophonist Michael Thomas says of Manuel Valera, Matt Brewer and Obed Calvaire, his A-list rhythm section on Illusion of Choice, his Criss Cross debut, and fourth leader album. “These musicians can play any style and sound like it’s the only thing they play. I wanted to explore these different areas and cohere them into an album, not sound like tunes stuck together for a CD. Everything was on the table. I wasn’t afraid to develop whatever ideas I came up with, and see where they went."
 

Although Illusion of Choice features an assembled-for-the-occasion ensemble rather than the working bands documented on his earlier albums, Michael Thomas, 36, considers it "the strongest thing I’ve done so far.” During the four months preceding the September 2023 recording session, Thomas generated eight originals tailored to the tonal personalities of his protean collaborators. They live up to the leader’s ballyhoo, nailing the shifting meters and intervallic challenges of his high-degree-of-difficulty pieces with panache and creative spirit.
 

“I try to give people enough to understand and absorb, but not so much as to make them wonder what’s going on,” Thomas says. “Particularly with respect to melodies, I’m trying to write tunes that don’t just sound nice, but facilitate playing and improvising as I want.” He adds that, although he plays multiple reeds and woodwinds, the alto saxophone is his creative home. “Alto is where I feel most comfortable, have the most control of my sound, and can express myself most easily.”

The album was recorded September 14, 2023 at the Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria by recording engineer Mike Marciano. He also did the editing, mixing and mastering at Systems Two.

The back story for Lage Lund’s sixth Criss Cross recording dates to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the spring of 2020. Lund – a native of Skien, Norway who’d lived in the U.S. since 1995 – had just returned to his homeland with his wife and two daughters, then 5 and 7 years old. With school on hiatus, the family had to improvise an at-home curriculum.
 

“My wife and I – mainly my wife – made it up on the fly,” Lund recalls three years later via Zoom. “One day the theme was learning about elephants, another day it was ‘Ancient Egypt’ or the ‘Stone Age’ or ‘Trees’ or ‘Horses’ – completely random.” In conjunction with these lessons, Lund established a daily ritual whereby he spent an hour or so writing a tune based on the theme du jour, another hour to 90 minutes recording it, and another two hours creating and editing a one-minute video – the better to fit within Instagram guidelines – from public domain GIFs. Over the course of five or six weeks, Lund created a playlist of 36 videos, which he uploaded to YouTube.
 

“It was a mental health project,” Lund says. “With touring gone and no one to play with, I wanted to give myself a task and feel at the end of the day I’d done something tangible – I didn’t have this song this morning, and now here it is. To pull it off, I dealt with short forms, mostly AABA structure, between 8 and 16 bars. Also, for the first time since my early twenties, I had an abundance of time to practice, which allowed me to delve into things – voice leading experiments, for example – that weren’t necessarily oriented towards getting ready for the next gig, the next tour, the next recording, but which interest me for the long term. It was a bit like going to an artist retreat or residency.”
 

Fast forward to the fall of 2021: Lund was back in the saddle, primarily working with saxophonist Melissa Aldana, whose 2022 Blue Note release '12 Stars' he co-wrote and produced. Soon thereafter, Criss Cross owner Jerry Teekens called to ascertain his interest in making another album. For Lund, 45 when the Most Peculiar session transpired in June 2022, the offer was an opportunity to reunite with a band he launched in 2014. Pianist Sullivan Fortner (35) and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (41), both among the most gifted practitioners ever to improvise on their respective instruments, contributed their unique mojo to Lund’s 2019 Criss Cross release, Terrible Animals (Criss 1402). Virtuoso bassist Matt Brewer (39), played on Lund’s first leader date (Romantic Latino for Ladies, on a Japanese label) in 2006, had Lund play guitar on his own Criss Cross debut Mythology (Criss 1373), and recently played on a Lund trio covers recital (with Sorey) for another label, including four songs by Andrew Hill.

The album was recorded June 17, 2022 at the Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria by recording engineer Mike Marciano. He also did the editing, mixing and mastering at Systems Two.