What is jazz?<\/p>\n
Is it Miles Davis jamming in a smoky club with one of his classic 50s quintets?\u00a0 Eddie Harris dazzling 70s hipsters with free-form electric sax?\u00a0 Quincy Jones literally playing it cool, making orchestral soul music?\u00a0 Bob James pushing a melody catchy enough to pass for pop?<\/p>\n
Jazz, it seems to me, isn\u2019t so much a genre of music as it is an attitude.\u00a0 It\u2019s freedom, improvisation, cross-pollination; it\u2019s innovative, unselfconscious, bold.<\/p>\n
And bold is definitely one of the first words that comes to mind when contemplating an instrumental-only quartet that attempts to meld classic jazz chops with melodic rock flair and occasional outbreaks of punkish musical anarchy.\u00a0 One thing I know for sure, I\u2019ve never heard anything quite like Choose To Find, and don\u2019t expect to again anytime soon.<\/p>\n
The band \u2013 pianist\/songwriter Todd Marston, guitarist Colin Sapp, bassist Dmitry Ishenko and drummer Michael Daillak — is comprised of graduates of the renowned Berklee College of Music, and their training definitely shows in the intricacy and confidence of these tunes.\u00a0 What\u2019s more surprising, given that bio, is how far these guys push outside the known boundaries of the forms they trained in.\u00a0 Calling this \u201djazz\u201d feels somewhat like calling In several cases, Choose To Find pull the equivalent of a compositional practical joke on the listener, getting you settled in a groove like the gentle, dreamy one that anchors \u201cFamily\u201d before sending the track off in wild psychedelic spirals in middle section.\u00a0 Eventually they right the ship, with Marston\u2019s piano steering the rest of the group back to the core melody line even as Sapp counter-punches with trembly, distorted riffs.<\/p>\n In a similar vein, \u201cHonesty\u201d finds Marston filling the front end with a repeating piano pattern as Sapp weaves guitar lines over and under like a bird in flight, before they again ride the cut right off the rails into almost atonal chaos in the middle section.<\/p>\n Ranging farther afield, \u201cLow Horse, High Horse\u201d powers through an appealing, rather early-Bruce Hornsby central piano\/bass melody, laying back here and there for some nice fills and hi-hat work from Daillak.\u00a0 The more expansive \u201cFarewell Song\u201d features steady rock drive and a cinematic feel, sort of like a mid-80s U2 instrumental — unless you count the jazzy drum solo at the bridge.<\/p>\n It\u2019s sometimes hard to get your bearings when the music is this unusual and gutsy.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t call this disc an easy listen, but for the listener who can keep up, it\u2019s a vastly entertaining safari into unexplored musical territory.\u00a0 <\/p>\n That said, is it jazz?\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s bold, innovative, free-form, diverse and shows off great musical chops.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7897],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-40150","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-choose-to-find","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40150"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40150"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}