Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet - Circuitous (2013)

This quintet CD features some of today’s top improvisers in the Chicago area; reed players Dave Rempis and Keefe Jackson are backed here by bassist Nate McBride, drummer Frank Rosaly and Boston-based pianist and group leader Pandelis Karayorgis who has written the compositions. The recording was made in January 2012 at Chicago Public Media’s state-of-the-art Jim & Kay Mabie Performance Studio following performances in local venues.

In the liner notes to this album, Stuart Broomer writes: “Everything here testifies to the validity of Karayorgis’s mixed methodology, from the expressive power of individual moments—the kind of bristling hyper-bop practiced by Rempis at one moment to the strange timbral explorations of Jackson at another, from the locked-in drive of McBride and Rosaly to Karayorgis’s cycling through the expanding language of jazz’s harmonic history—to the achievement of whole pieces, their disparate components refracting and shifting their significance. Karayorgis and the quintet succeed brilliantly here in creating music that both reverberates with the tradition and creates its own extraordinary musical states—textures, visions and collisions that are unique, that could not be produced by any other group or any singular method.”

Tracklist:

1. Undertow (6:04)
2. Nudge (6:29)
3. Swarm (9:33)
4. Circuitous (5:28)
5. Vortex (8:51)
6. Evenfall (4:34)
7. Blue Line (9:15)
8. Here In July (5:17)
9. Souvenir (5:25)

Personnel:

Dave Rempis: tenor, alto and baritone saxophones;
Keefe Jackson: tenor saxophone, bass and contrabass clarinet;
Pandelis Karayorgis: piano;
Nate McBride: bass;
Frank Rosaly: drums.