Michael Sarian | Live At Cliff Bell's

In his third quartet outing, Toronto-born, Buenos Aires-raised, and Brooklyn-based trumpeter and composer Michael Sarian fulfills a lifelong dream of releasing a live album with Live at Cliff Bell’s. It was a somewhat last-minute endeavor, as Sarian hadn’t planned on recording a live album until engineer Jon Georgievski floated the idea shortly before their performance at the legendary Detroit venue. Recorded during their spring 2023 tour, which saw the quartet perform across the Greater Toronto Area, the Northeast, and the Midwest, this live set features Sarian’s longtime ensemble: pianist Santiago Leibson, bassist Marty Kenney, and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell. They perform tunes from their previous two albums, alongside new compositions that showcase gritty swing, Armenian sensibilities, and ample room for group exploration and interplay. The quartet’s repertoire is inspired by greats such as Enrico Rava, Tomasz Stańko, Kenny Wheeler, and Paul Motian.

Dedicated to his cousin Nick, “Primo” (cousin in Spanish), is arguably the most ‘straight-ahead’ track of the album. The idea for the composition came after getting a copy of Nicolas Slonimsky’s book, Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Sarian based the composition on a scale found on just the second page, in the ‘Interpolation of Two Notes’ in the Tritone Progression section. With the flat two, major third, sharp fourth, perfect fifth and flat seventh, the scale has an altered blues feel to it, which was perfect for Sarian’s primo since he has an affinity for the genre. The marking at the top of the chart is “fast + gritty swing” with no chords to be found, just the scale on which the tune is based.

Sarian began writing “Aurora,” the title track from the quartet’s first album in 2020, on February 15, 2019. Although the word literally means dawn, the composition came after hearing of a mass shooting that day in Aurora, Illinois. The alternation between sus2 and sus4 chords throughout the first section, paired with a simple melody, bear a somber mood, a hopelessness which Sarian felt assuming #Aurora was trending because of the 2012 mass shooting there, only to find out there another had taken place.

Pianist Santiago Leibson masterfully transitions from "Aurora" into the tension-filled "The Pilgrim," dedicated to Enrico Rava (after the Italian trumpeter’s 1975 album The Pilgrim and The Stars). The seven sixteenth-note pickup to this melody is what gave the piece its start, after Sarian heard Rava play it in his solo on the tune “Bella.”  Originally released on Sarian’s 2022 album Living at the End of the World, this piece is a crash course in tension, building over nearly 10 minutes, releasing only at the end.

“Yi Ku Ghimetn Chim Kidi” (I Don’t Know Your True Value) is an arrangement of a piece by Sayat Nova, an 18th century Armenian poet and troubadour. There is a sense of longing and melancholy that is practically built into the melody, and just like the melodies of so many great Armenian composers, it shines on its own. The melody remains true to Sayat Nova’s, with Sarian’s arrangement providing harmonic support moving it forward, emphasizing the sorrow and longing in the composition which bleeds into Kenney’s and Sarian’s solos.

Composed shortly before hitting the road on this tour, “Glass Mountains” is a tribute to the Armenian people of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno Karabakh). Forced out of their ancestral homes by Azerbaijan after a decades long conflict, this enclave which has been Armenian majority for centuries now endures an ethnic cleansing by regimes that deny the Armenian Genocide, and this Armenian’s population’s right to self-determination. The title refers to the region’s mountainous terrain, and that even these mountains can be delicate.

After a stunning bass solo, Marty Kenney sets up the next piece, in what Sarian has dubbed his short Armenian Suite. “Portrait of Haile” was composed in honor of Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia who adopted the ‘Arba Lijoch’, a brass band of 40 Armenian orphans (and their director Kevork Nalbandian) who had escaped the Armenian Genocide, and took them under his wing.

Finally, this first set closes out with “Living at the End of the World,” the title track from the quartet’s 2022 studio album, inspired by Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, wherein the main character spends half of the novel in a town called ‘The End of the World.’ Reading this during March and April of 2020, a time during which the world seemingly was coming to an end, gave Sarian a different perspective on what the end of the world could be: instead of the world as we know it coming to an end, we could approach it as simply a new, temporary space we are living in. The title track is a bluesy shuffle with a few roadblocks thrown in there, keeping the listener and musicians on their feet.

Live at Cliff Bell’s sees the quartet’s affinity for group interplay paired with the freedom and intensity provided by a live performance. We can hear the closeness of the audience, their feedback, cheering and applause, which admittedly caught Sarian somewhat off guard as the ensemble sometimes veered into more exploration than he would have expected Cliff Bell’s clientele to tolerate. It captures a cohesive, working group in its prime and in the moment.

Live at Cliff Bell’s is out September 13, 2024 on CD and digital.