Janus, out October 14 on Sunnyside Records, features
inventive interpretations of medieval, Baroque and contemporary classical,
bebop and modern jazz
"Nick Sanders is a mad genius-hauntingly melodic and
utterly unpredictable. Just when you think you've mapped his trajectory, he's
gone in a new direction, spinning off fresh, unconventional phrases." -
Brian Zimmerman, DownBeat
"Logan Strosahl proves there is no Inside/Outside
divide, dismantling all dialectics: he's melodic and free, reverent and
irreverent, methodical and spontaneous, swinging and angular, raw and
beautiful." - Aaron Goldberg
CD Release concert on Tuesday, October 11 at Cornelia St.
Café, NYC
In ancient Roman mythology, Janus was the god of time,
passageways, beginnings and endings. With his two diametrically opposed faces,
he looked simultaneously backwards and forwards in time. Janus is thus an ideal
title for the new duo recording by pianist Nick Sanders and saxophonist Logan
Strosahl, which mines centuries of compositions to create music entirely of the
present moment. The pair also share a unique chemistry, honed over nearly a
decade of working together, that echoes Janus in its suggestion of two voices
sharing one mind.
Janus will be released on October 14, 2016 via Sunnyside
Records, almost ten years after Sanders and Strosahl began playing duo in the
basement of the dorms at Boston's New England Conservatory, where both were
students. The album features an intriguing mix of material, from medieval,
Baroque and 20th-century French composers through bebop and Songbook standards
to witty and inventive original pieces.
That stunning range of repertoire is not intended to show
off the pair's musical knowledge, encyclopedic though it may be. It's simply a
collection of songs, both insist, that they found appealing and that sparked
imaginative improvisation. "Genre isn't crucial," Strosahl says.
"What's crucial is improvisation. Even though we're working with music
that represents different styles, they're really all from the same canon.
They're all Western music and we're filtering all of it through ourselves.
Genres have been artificially broken up, so we're just trying to take a larger,
simpler and clearer view."
That broadened perspective allowed Strosahl and Sanders to
find just as much territory to explore in a romantic 14th-century rondeau by
Guillaume de Machaut as in the acute modernist corners of Monk's
"Thelonious" or in their own playful, co-composed "Be-Bop
Tune," which distorts the revered jazz language as through a funhouse
mirror. The moods and colors shift over the course of these dozen tunes, but
the duo's approach stays the same whether a composition began life as an
elegant chamber piece or a swinging nightclub burner. All are translated into
the same language, one that the pianist and saxophonist have developed from
college basements to bandstands but that was nearly intact the moment they
first joined forces.
"From the beginning, we both approached the jazz
tradition not in identical ways, but like two sides of the same coin,"
Strosahl says. Sanders adds, "We always played really well together. It
was always fun and didn't take any work. It was already there, right
away."
Since meeting in 2007, both have recorded with their own
projects. Sanders has released two albums with his trio featuring bassist Henry
Fraser and drummer Connor Baker, both produced by his mentor, Fred Hersch. In
2015 Strosahl made his debut with Up Go We, featuring his septet - or as he
calls it, his "team" - that includes Sanders and the pianist's trio
mates within its ranks. But they've continually returned to the duo
configuration and continued to find fresh inspiration in the partnership.
The album begins with Sanders' vertiginous
"Sigma," an original piece that is alternately dizzying and jagged
and which was inspired by a character from the "Mega Man" video game
series. Gaming is also the surprising inspiration behind the melancholy
"R.P.D.," which achingly captures a mood of forlorn nostalgia for a
bygone era - only in this case it's a yearning for the days prior to the zombie
apocalypse of "Resident Evil."
The passing of time is also central to Strosahl's
contributions to the album, in keeping with the Janus theme. The title track is
split into two halves, eventually encapsulating a sensation of frozen time, or
peering back or forward from one time into another. In both
"Allemande" and "Mazurka," the saxophonist builds upon
well-established dance forms, continuing the engagement with early musical
forms that runs through much of his music. "I like the formality and
clearness of just naming something after a dance," he explains. "You
let the piece speak for itself and just listen to the music."
While improvising on standards like "Old Folks"
and "Stardust," and especially on a classic jazz tune like
"Thelonious," improvising is a well-established tradition. That
approach has become antithetical to modern classical performance, but Sanders
and Strosahl point out that hasn't always been the case, offering precedent for
their renditions of pieces by de Machaut, Baroque composer François Couperin,
and influential 20th-century composer Olivier Messiaen.
"Mozart left blank spaces in concertos for cadenzas to
be improvised," Sanders points out, before Strosahl picks up on his point.
"It was par for the course because it works," the saxophonist says.
"It's amazing hearing people spontaneously create music. We're not trying
to give everything a 'jazz interpretation.' We're just going into music from
multiple times and places and playing it with what we know about music and
improvising."
In fact, the one common trait that all of the music on Janus
shares is the sense of possibility that exists in each. Janus was, after all,
also the god of doorways, and each of the twelve near-miniatures on the album
finds Sanders and Strosahl venturing into some previously unopened portal
leading off from each song. "Maybe subconsciously, we look for music that
has an air of mystery," Strosahl says. "Spiritually, when you play
it, you feel like there's a world that you can tap into and uncover."
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