Broken Shadows FT. Tim Berne, Chris Speed, Reid Anderson, And Dave King

Broken Shadows is a quartet of kindred spirits communing over shared loves and common inspirations, radiating not only homage but aspiration – to make music with deep roots reach out into the present moment, alive and attuned and moving through our air now. These four musicians hailing from the northern half of America – Tim Berne, Chris Speed, Reid Anderson, and Dave King – have banded together to reinterpret the timeless sounds conjured by great men from the rural South and heartland of the country: Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden. These iconic figures created an ever-resonant avant-garde out of the folk-art influences of their early surroundings, a canon that comprises the hard blues and deep lament, keening celebration and hollering protest. Wound through the DNA of such avant-jazz classics as “Dogon A.D.,” “Lonely Woman,” “Civilization Day,” “Walls- Bridges” and “Song for Ché” are the age-old sounds of back-alley bars and carnival midways, funeral processions and holiday parades, the rave-ups of Saturday night shading into the hymns of Sunday morning. The way saxophonists Berne and Speed perform this music with the bass-and-drum team of Anderson and King has a rocking, roughhewn harmonic convergence wholly in keeping with the source materials, even as their improvisations have a searching, burning modernism of their own. To channel the cultural history of this music, the players of Broken Shadows can rely on their personal history as friends and collaborators; among various associations, Speed played in Berne’s Bloodcount band in the 1990s, while Anderson and King are two-thirds of the genre defying band The Bad Plus.This foursome is onto something special here – the emotive breath and beat of this music being undeniable, infectious; these are players known for their ability to take it out, but Broken Shadows gives them a vehicle to get down. — Bradley Bambarger