Label: Allos Documents
Source: Cdbaby
Genre: Modern Creative Jazz
Like
maps, all music has a scale. Not just a set of pitches but a spatial
corollary. The amount of time one gives a note, or puts between two of
them, correlates directly with the scope of the landscape imagined by
the listener. A drone becomes a vista, the edges of the sound like the
measureless horizon. More frenetic arrangements evoke something closer
to the pace at which we experience our lives, a musical expression of
our inability to hold on to any one moment before it is subsumed by the
next, gone as quickly as an unsustained note.
On his adventurous and cinematic debut, Life After Life, drummer and composer Eric Platz moves seamlessly between these imagined scales, juxtaposing them against one another like some cartographic impossibility. This movement becomes a sort of narrative device, the start of a chapter, or its end, and the tension and drama in the shifting perspective begins to tell a story of its own.
Platz composed the music on Life After Life for its three principal players: Chicago-based clarinetist James Falzone (KLANG, Allos Musica, The Renga Ensemble); cellist Leanne Zacharias (Music for Spaces, Correction Line Ensemble); and himself. A veteran improviser, Platz is a drummer and percussionist of incredible nuance, a skill he honed over several decades as a sideman, touring with acts in and outside the jazz world. If the music on Life After Life is a descendant of the Third Stream and contemporary improvisation, it is also a natural culmination of Platz’s prismatic interests, refracted through his affinities for jazz, classical, folk, and world musics.
He began playing drums at age 10, shortly after his family moved to Wilmington, Delaware. Despite his age, he began studying with a percussionist from the Philadelphia Orchestra, who turned him on to Tony Williams. He fell in love with Miles Davis’s The Complete Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four and More. “I remember listening to the drumming, and it was so musical,” Platz says. “It was this continuous narrative. That’s what I wanted to do.” Read More...
On his adventurous and cinematic debut, Life After Life, drummer and composer Eric Platz moves seamlessly between these imagined scales, juxtaposing them against one another like some cartographic impossibility. This movement becomes a sort of narrative device, the start of a chapter, or its end, and the tension and drama in the shifting perspective begins to tell a story of its own.
Platz composed the music on Life After Life for its three principal players: Chicago-based clarinetist James Falzone (KLANG, Allos Musica, The Renga Ensemble); cellist Leanne Zacharias (Music for Spaces, Correction Line Ensemble); and himself. A veteran improviser, Platz is a drummer and percussionist of incredible nuance, a skill he honed over several decades as a sideman, touring with acts in and outside the jazz world. If the music on Life After Life is a descendant of the Third Stream and contemporary improvisation, it is also a natural culmination of Platz’s prismatic interests, refracted through his affinities for jazz, classical, folk, and world musics.
He began playing drums at age 10, shortly after his family moved to Wilmington, Delaware. Despite his age, he began studying with a percussionist from the Philadelphia Orchestra, who turned him on to Tony Williams. He fell in love with Miles Davis’s The Complete Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four and More. “I remember listening to the drumming, and it was so musical,” Platz says. “It was this continuous narrative. That’s what I wanted to do.” Read More...
1. Life After Life One 02:26
2. Seeds of Doubt 07:54
3. Redwood Vesper 05:36
4. Life After Life Two 02:39
5. Blood Meridian 21:39
6. Life After Life Three 01:33
7. Marrakesh High Line 11:35
2. Seeds of Doubt 07:54
3. Redwood Vesper 05:36
4. Life After Life Two 02:39
5. Blood Meridian 21:39
6. Life After Life Three 01:33
7. Marrakesh High Line 11:35
Eric Platz: drums, percussion, mbira
James Falzone: clarinet, shruti box
Leanne Zacharias: cello
Don Benedictson: electric bass
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