Drew Gress Quintet

Bassist Drew Gress makes futuristic music that embraces post-modern lyricism. Tim Berne's Acoustic Hard Cell trio is the quintet's backbone. Compositions are bathed in a cinematic glow, with fragile melodies, rich harmony, complex chord progressions, unorthodox rhythms and time signatures, contemporary dissonance and a refined swing feel. Berne and Alessi's lively sounds are a constant search for variety. The combination is rarely in sync, but instead preserves a rather grating distance: simplifying, omitting notes and drifting along intuitively. The arrangements steer the listener on his way without GPS. Nothing is what it seems. The music steadily changes colour and fights its way out. The floor is clear for a musical debate, with improvisation in monologue and/or dialogue, and even more when it feels right. An update on the way brass instruments intertwined to form New Orleans jazz. In his music, Gress achieves moments of hyper-modern counterpoint, like a sort of Dixieland of the twenty-first century. For him, this is the climax of musical conversation, with a nod to Philip de Sousa's 'Stars and Stripes Forever'. "The extra-musical element helps", according to Gress, "I visualised spumoni, and blocks of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream. This helped me think in terms of this sort of block so as to achieve layers in my musical material."