Matt Moran - Audible Spirits

Vibraphonist and Diskonife co-founder Matt Moran brings us Audible Spirits, the eponymous release of a collaboration which recognizes that jazz brings its history with it, and that performance is the fulcrum between the past and the future: as musicians push the boundaries for the future, those that came before us are always present in the room. These three musicians – Sarah Elizabeth Charles (voice and effects), Curtis Hasselbring (samples and trombone), and Matt Moran (vibraphone) – use their instruments and electronic samples of Jamey Aebersold Play-A-Long recordings to explore legacy in jazz. By reverently diving deeply into this iconic jazz education tool and exploring jazz standards, Audible Spirits is a manifesto on historical lineage and individual creativity in a hall of mirrors.

Originally created as a live theater piece, Audible Spirits is grounded on the bedrock idea that public performance of jazz with a pre-recorded rhythm section is heresy. At the same time, generations of jazz musicians have come up practicing to tracks, especially Jamey Aebersold Play-A-Long tracks, in private. During the Covid pandemic the trio reworked the theater piece into a discrete musical statement that blurs the boundaries between heresy and convention, background and foreground, tradition and innovation, jazz and improvisation, electronic and acoustic sound, and the past and the future.

By sampling and manipulating the sounds of these jazz rhythm sections (with the permission of Jamey Aebersold), Audible Spirits invokes classic jazz sounds and forms and yet transforms them, sometimes subtly and sometimes completely. Each song is handled differently: the original track may be deconstructed to make new sounds that are played live to express the composition (Stolen Moments), or layered so that multiple versions of the form happen simultaneously or sequentially (All The Things You Are or Moment’s Notice), or manipulated as part of a “duo” improvisation with a soloist (Like Someone In Love), or any other path the musicians can imagine. The result is both reverent of the jazz tradition and deeply resists attempts to codify it. Vibraphonist Matt Moran said, “the project started as a way to process the institutionalization of jazz education, but ended up becoming much more than that. I came to see these recordings and their role in jazz in a much more complex way. The recordings themselves are a response to the ghosts in the room, and then working with the recordings becomes a refraction of that process.” All sounds on this record not made by voice, vibraphone, or trombone are from Jamey Aebersold Play-A-Long recordings, used with permission.