muzycy:
KLANG
James Falzone: clarinet
Jason Adasiewicz: vibraphone
Jason Roebke: bass
Tim Daisy: drums

Guest Artists
Jeb Bishop: trombone
Josh Berman: cornet
Keefe Jackson: tenor saxophone & bass clarinet
Fred Lonberg-Holm: cello and electronics

LINER NOTES
James Falzone doesn’t have Benny Goodman’s photo on his practice room wall. And he’s not going to pore over a 1930’s–1940’s lexicon. While he had a fun time playing in a swing revival band during the 1990s, he doesn’t need to repeat those riffs ever again. Nostalgia doesn’t enter his mind, whether it’s for a time seven decades ago, or last Wednesday. The same is most likely true for everyone in his group, KLANG, as well as the guest artists on this record.

All of which makes Falzone, and his cohorts, a perfect fit to interpret the King Of Swing’s music alongside his own compositions on Other Doors. He knows that for jazz to continue as a living, breathing art, the essentials must be the same now as they were in Goodman’s time: having a wide palette of resourceful musical ideas and the imagination to make those ideas work together in new ways; and putting together a team of musicians who can respond to quick-thinking changes with complementary thoughts of their own.

This project began when Neil Tesser, representing the board of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, approached Falzone about performing a Goodman tribute at the 2009 Chicago Jazz Festival. It was the 100-year anniversary of Goodman’s birth, and he was a native of the city’s West Side. While Falzone respected Goodman, his legacy, this particular celebration and the festival itself, he initially thought he was the wrong man for the job. While he did have that gig playing retro-swing dances 14 years earlier, Falzone had since studied modern classical composition at the New England Conservatory, become an important part of Chicago’s renowned free-improv scene and investigated many forms of ethnic music traditions.

But the more he listened to Goodman’s music and thought about his life, the more fascinated he became. Falzone saw that Goodman’s insistence on hi.......
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