Brian Landrus – an
essential voice on low woodwinds – explores heartbreak, longing and romance on
intimate new recording For Now
Album features jazz
masters Fred Hersch, Drew Gress and Billy Hart
plus Michael Rodriguez, Sara Caswell and a string quartet
For Now includes ten Landrus
compositions, plus “Invitation,” “’Round Midnight”
and a milestone Landrus & Hersch duo flight on “Ruby,
My Dear”
“Tonal nuance, melodic sense and instrumental command that set him
apart from his peers.”
– Ed Enright, DownBeat
Available May 15, 2020 via BlueLand Records
For Now has
a lot to say about romance, and it says it with quiet conviction and passionate
declaration. Ace multi-reedist and composer Brian Landrus whose groundbreaking 2017 large-ensemble album Generations “takes the jazz big band
tradition into the mesosphere” (Giovanni Russonello, New York Times), turns
here to inner pathways, bringing together a remarkable quartet: pianist Fred Hersch bassist Drew Gress and drummer Billy Hart. Rounding out the musical equation are the brilliant young players Michael Rodriguez (trumpet) and Sara Caswell (violin), plus inventive
and elegant string quartet arrangements by Landrus and the distinguished opera
composer Robert Aldridge featuring
Caswell and Joyce Hamman (violin),
Lois Martin (viola) and Jody
Redhage-Ferber (cello). The album is produced by Aldridge and composer/writer Herschel Garfein, both Grammy winners.
“A
composer of great strength and substance,” (All About Jazz), Brian Landrus, has emerged from
his 30s with elation, heartache, delight and disenchantment, and he brings all
that experience to the album’s ten original compositions and three standards. “As
I was writing For Now, I could
feel it coming from a very deep place, directly from some truly difficult and
some unforgettably beautiful life experiences,” Landrus says. “I felt, at every
moment, ‘I need to do this.’” In compositions like “The Second Time,” “ JJ” and
“Clarity in Time,” that need stirs just beneath the elegant surface of the
music. In the title track, “For Now,” it pours out as an unaffected love ballad.
Often, Landrus sets a forthright and open-hearted tune over deceptively complex
harmonies, as in the tender “Her Smile,” and in his waltzes, which can be
searching and impetuous (“The Night of Change”), sun-splashed melancholy (“The Miss”) or noonday cool (“The Wait”).
His compositional voice confidently ranges from tunes that have the poise and
assurance of standards-you’ve-never-heard, such as “The Signs” and “JJ,” to
abstract romantic dreamscapes like “The Night of Change.”
Throughout these varied compositions,
Landrus plays with infinite shadings and suppleness on instruments often
associated with thundering harshness or compromised tone. On the baritone
saxophone he sings out tenderly and with deep feeling on “Ruby, My Dear” and “The
Second Time,” spins sweet roulades light as air on “Her Smile” and “The Miss,”
stays low for a crushed-velvet sound on “JJ,” and plays with a dusky burnish
that seems to linger after each phrase on “The Signs,” “Invitation,” and “Clarity in Time.” Landrus reserves
the bass clarinet for intimate and
lyrical musings (“For Now,” “The Wait,” “For Whom I Imagined”), but then sets
free its full palette of colors for his astonishing solo version of Monk’s
masterpiece “’Round Midnight.” “The Night
of Change” features Landrus soloing with glowing angularity on alto flute.
-over-
A perfect team of
collaborators are at the heart of For Now.
“I have wanted to play with Fred Hersch
since first hearing him twenty years ago,” Landrus recounts. “I love how he
finds the deepest color and beauty in everything he plays. From the moment we
began recording, he played my original compositions as if he had written them.”
As Landrus worked on the music
for the album, another inspiration struck. “In certain compositions, the
harmonies I was hearing could only be properly realized with a string quartet,”
he says. “A longstanding inspiration from Harry
Carney with Strings and Stan Getz’s Focus
came back to fill my head with
lush string sonorities.” He and Robert Aldridge added string arrangements that are
clean, inventive and vibrant.
Rounding out this album of
ten original Landrus compositions are three very special performances of
standards, including Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” featuring Landrus on solo
bass-clarinet, Bronislaw Kaper’s “Invitation” featuring fresh, effortless swing
from the whole ensemble in Landrus’s own arrangement, and an exhilarating duet performance
featuring Landrus and Hersch on Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear.”
“I consider Fred to be the
foremost Monk interpreter of our time,” says Landrus. “So I was astounded when
he told me that he had never publicly played ‘Ruby, My Dear,’ What floored me
was his freedom with it; most pianists don’t dare diverge from what Monk
played. Fred made it his own in a deeply reverential way.”
“Ruby, My Dear” is the
capstone to this masterfully assured and variegated album; an interpretation
for now and for the ages.
Brian
Landrus
Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Brian Landrus has
established himself as one of the world’s leading voices on low woodwinds. He
has been voted #1 Rising Star Baritone Saxophonist in DownBeat Magazine’s 63rd
Annual Critics Poll, and voted the #3 Baritone Saxophonist in the world in the
2020 JazzTimes Readers Poll.
In addition to leading his own groups, Landrus has toured internationally with Esperanza Spalding and performed with Bob Brookmeyer, Lewis
Nash, John Lockwood, Nicholas Payton, Nir Felder, Marcus Strickland, Jerry
Bergonzi, Danilo Perez, Gary Smulyan, Maria Schneider, The Temptations, Feist,
The Four Tops, George Garzone, The Drifters, Jason Palmer, Rufus Reid, and
Ralph Alessi, among others.
Landrus has released ten albums as a leader, including six on his
BlueLand Records label. Born in 1978 and raised in Nevada, Landrus began
playing saxophone at 12 and was performing professionally by 15. He earned his bachelor’s
degree from University of Nevada-Reno and two Master of Music degrees from New
England Conservatory, and a PhD in classical composition from Rutgers University.
Landrus is on faculty at Rutgers University.
