Osby, Greg - Inner Circle (special)
SKU
11-BN 99871
Saxist Osby has been making albums with great players since the mid 80s and this one from 2002 is on Blue Note. So he's certainly not an 'unknown', but I would venture to say he's definitely a bit under-appreciated. This is a beautifully recorded, swinging modern jazz album with compositional smarts and a bit of bite. The band is about as all-star as you could get in 2002: pianist Jason Moran, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, bassist Taurus Mateen and drummer Eric Harland all play their butts off. The reviewer below gets it exactly right: 'If you are into progressive/avant-garde, yet accessible contemporary jazz, this is your disk. You will not be disappointed'. Highly recommended!
"I became interested in this CD primarily because I was looking for dates on which Stefon Harris appeared. I'm a huge fan of Harris's extremely intelligent composition and playing, so anybody with whom he shared company had to be remarkable. Well, here he is, working with Greg Osby and fellow sideman (and ingenious solo artist in his own right) Jason Moran. I was delighted to hear how well these artists complement each other, when any one of them could have easily overpowered the other.
This is still Greg Osby's date, of course, which is why he composed almost all of the songs, except for one by Björk and Mingus's classic "Self Portrait in Three Colors." The opening "Entruption" is a wonderfully frustrating performance, using space to give a stop-start feel, without sacrificing an implied groove. It's my favorite on the disk, rivaled only by the Mingus cover and "Fragmatic Decoding," the kind of song you'd imagine a String Theory mathematician would compose. As a non-musician, I'm simply amazed that anybody could play the dense thing.
If you are into progressive/avant-garde, yet accessible contemporary jazz, this is your disk. You will not be disappointed."- Darryl Dickson-Carr