“Getting invited to do a project like this is kind of like winning the jazz lottery,” Thomas says. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience to work with Jimmy, who goes out of his way to do everything right. He makes sure the band is taken care of, he hires the right people, he takes care of all the details; all you have to do as the bandleader is worry about the music. It’s an incredibly freeing experience.”
Thomas responded to this unprecedented opportunity by assembling a dream band to realize a new set of outstanding compositions. The frontline reunites him with trumpet great Jason Palmer, who recently released his own second album for Giant Step Arts and with whom Thomas worked regularly for two years as part of Palmer’s long-running house band at Boston’s historic Wally’s Jazz Café. The quartet also features Miguel Zenon Quartet bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Johnathan Blake, whose exhilarating album Trion was among Giant Step’s inaugural releases.
Creating such once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for artists, freeing them from the usual demands of record label and sales chart expectations, is precisely why Katz founded Giant Step Arts.
Recorded live over two nights at New York City’s renowned Jazz Gallery, Event Horizon muses on the role technology plays in modern life while responding to both its advantages and its drawbacks. “Technology is something that we deal with every day: computers, smartphones, things like that,” Thomas says. “It can definitely work on our side, but we can also end up relying on it too much. We’re always checking our calendar and checking our email, which can impose a framework on our lives that can lead to feeling trapped. The music I wrote for Event Horizon has an element of structure that comes from a lot of the technology that we use, but I wanted to give the band a lot of freedom once we got into the tunes.”
The live recording cast this uneasy relationship with technological into stark perspective. While a studio may offer any number of modern conveniences, Thomas felt the old-school method, while inevitably a tightrope walk, also inspired daring performances that might not have happened with a safety net in place. “All the classic recordings we love were recorded in a similar way to this, where the band is just being the band and somebody documented it. But while we recorded in an old-fashioned way, I didn’t want the music to have an old-fashioned feel. This is very new music – challenging for the band, and challenging for the individual players.”
Katz founded Giant Step Arts in order to support artists like Palmer, Blake and others whose talents he felt had not been sufficiently recognized or supported. Thomas is a slightly different case, a less established talent at the outset of a promising career. Not that he doesn’t already boast impressive credentials: since his debut album, he’s appeared on more than 30 recordings and co-founded the Terraza Big Band with bassist Edward Perez, releasing the ensemble’s heralded debut, One Day Wonder, in May 2019. But Katz impressed upon the gifted saxophonist the ambitious expectations he holds for the artists who record for GSA.
“Look at the other saxophonists who have recorded on Giant Step Arts projects,” Katz points out. “Chris Potter, Mark Turner, Eric Alexander – some of the greatest players on the scene today. The truth is I’m looking for someone who really wants to step up their game and show the highest level of creativity in their art. Michael is capable of extraordinary things, and I’m really happy with how committed he was to this project and to trying to make a bold new statement.”
That may the only demand Katz makes on the artists he works with, but it’s a tall order indeed. “I want to be sure everyone involved is trying to make a masterpiece,” he insists. “The goal on each one of these projects is to make a modern A Love Supreme or a modern Kind of Blue. Obviously those are very high standards, but we’re going into each one of these projects with that as the goal. I’m not interested in professional performances; I’m interested in performances that history is going to remember.”
Grammy-winning saxophonist, composer, and arranger Michael Thomas has been an active member of the New York City jazz community since arriving in 2011. Holding degrees from the University of Miami, New England Conservatory, and The Juilliard School, Michael has performed throughout the United States and abroad, including tours in Central and South America, Australia, Europe, Japan, and Russia. He has appeared as a sideman with Brad Mehldau, Dafnis Prieto, Nicholas Payton, Miguel Zenón, Etienne Charles, and Jason Palmer, and Michael’s talents can be heard on over 30 recordings. As a composer and arranger, Michael has been commissioned by school and professional ensembles throughout the United States, and he is currently a member of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop in New York City. Since 2015, Michael has co-lead the Terraza Big Band, and the ensemble’s first album, One Day Wonder, was released in May 2019 on Outside In Music. Michael’s work has been recognized by DownBeat magazine as well as the “Keep an Eye” competition in Amsterdam, NL, and in 2016 he was a winner of the New York Youth Symphony’s First Music commission series. Since September 2018, Michael has been on faculty at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music as an Artist Teacher of jazz saxophone in the Jackie McLean Jazz Studies Institute.
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