Edward Simon & Ensemble Venezuela

Often heard inside a piano-bass-drums trio setting, Edward Simon is a noted creative jazz and post-bop pianist whose performing and documenting career continues to be based in america since the later ’80s, however the music of Venezuela — the united states of his birth and preteen years — has generally remained near his heart. While Latin jazz tastes surface area in Simon albums such as for example 1998’s La Bikina, nowhere is normally his house country’s musical impact more powerful than in the straightforwardly called Ensemble Venezuela, that your pianist shaped in 2003. Melding jazz and Venezuelan folk musics and executing Simon’s original materials aswell as his agreements of compositions penned by significant Venezuelan artists, Outfit Venezuela features, as well as the head on piano, drummer Adam Cruz and tenor saxophonist Tag Turner (both longstanding Simon collaborators); Venezuelan-born, New York-based brothers flutist Marco Granados and maracas participant Leonardo Granados (also a observed bolero and tango vocalist); and two observed musicians on the existing Venezuelan picture, bassist Roberto Koch and cuatro participant Jorge Glem. Increasing the group’s different timbral and textural palette are many guest music artists: bass clarinetist John Ellis, harpist Edmar Castañeda (blessed in Bogotá, Colombia), and percussionist Luis Quintero. In 2005 Chamber Music America commissioned Simon to create “Venezuelan Collection” for the ensemble, which, after live shows at celebrations and locations in both USA and Venezuela, documented the four-part structure at Brooklyn, New York’s Systems Two studio room in nov 2012. The recording Venezuelan Suite — including both collection and a Simon set up of Heraclio Fernández’s “Un Diablo Suelto” — premiered from the Sunnyside label in January 2014.