Klang: Other Doors

'So unmistakably right, a genuine understanding of the Ur-material projected into the present. Subtle thing. Not easy to convey. Immensely impressive . . . this is music driven along by Falzone's remarkable, capacious imagination and grasp of group dynamics. The municipal hype delivers big on Other Doors. KLANG made a remarkable start with last year's Tea Music. This consolidates the debut, adds a layer, and does thoughtful honor to Benny and Hamp and Charlie and Gene, which is no small feat.' ~ Brian Morton, Point of Departure James Falzone doesn't have Benny Goodman's photo on his practice room wall. And he's not going to pore over a 1930's-1940's lexicon. While he had a fun time playing in a swing revival band during the 1990s, he doesn't need to repeat those riffs ever again. Nostalgia doesn't enter his mind, whether it's for a time seven decades ago, or last Wednesday. The same is most likely true for everyone in his group, KLANG, as well as the guest artists on this record. All of which makes Falzone, and his cohorts, a perfect fit to interpret the King Of Swing's music alongside his own compositions on Other Doors. He knows that for jazz to continue as a living, breathing art, the essentials must be the same now as they were in Goodman's time: having a wide palette of resourceful musical ideas and the imagination to make those ideas work together in new ways; and putting together a team of musicians who can respond to quick-thinking changes with complementary thoughts of their own. This project began when Neil Tesser, representing the board of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, approached Falzone about performing a Goodman tribute at the 2009 Chicago Jazz Festival. It was the 100-year anniversary of Goodman's birth, and he was a native of the city's West Side. While Falzone respected Goodman, his legacy, this particular celebration and the festival itself, he initially thought he was the wrong man for the job. While he did have that gig playing retro-swing dances 14 years earlier, Falzone had since studied modern classical composition at the New England Conservatory, become an important part of Chicago's renowned free-improv scene and investigated many forms of ethnic music traditions. But the more he listened to Goodman's music and thought about his life, the more fascinated he became. Falzone saw that Goodman's insistence on hiring the best musicians regardless of their race and fighting for their equitable treatment was an early step towards the civil rights movement, commemorated through this disc's title track recalling an incident in the South during the late 1930's when Goodman defied segregation and demanded that all the members of his integrated band be allowed to use the same door to enter the venue. Falzone also discovered that Goodman's community of musicians was very much like present-day Chicago. quot;Like he and his co-conspirators, (Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Charlie Christian), we have a community of players in Chicago at the present who are spurring each other on to new creativity both on record and in real-time on the stage. The core members of KLANG (Daisy, Roebke, Adasiewicz) and the guest artist I brought in (Berman, Lonberg-Holm, Bishop, Jackson) are, in my opinion, some of the finest musicians working in jazz and improvised music today, each with a strong and unique voice and their contributions to this record are vital. I set up the arrangements and created new compositions to allow everyone space