Danny Fisher-Lochhead Large Ensemble

The 8-piece who’s who of Maine improvised music and jazz celebrate their debut album, World of Difference on Fishkill Records. Featuring Emma Stanley, Ryan Blotnick, Ross Gallagher, Mali Obomsawin, Brian Shankar Adler, Alex Truelove, Aaron Henry, and Danny Fisher-Lochhead.

The Danny Fisher-Lochhead Large Ensemble celebrates World of Difference, a lush and transportive five-piece suite, out now on Fishkill Records. Composed in Fisher-Lochhead’s home in Bar Harbor and recorded in Portland, Maine, these pieces express the breadth of his musical vision and voice. Passages of driving rhythmic intensity arrive seamlessly in the open space of a lucidly beautiful horn chorale; composed melodic figures are punctuated with bursts of ecstatic cacophony; nothing is static; patterns emerge and subside, expand and contract, driven by a deep internal logic of harmony and forward motion.

Fisher-Lochhead’s compositions often begin with the seed of a bass line, a starting point that lends the resulting work an innate sense of groundedness, a deep groove and a sense of momentum. From here, he builds up; the guitar, the horns and percussion build in and around each other, all in a dance with the bass (or basses –– Fisher-Lochhead often incorporates an unusual lineup of two bass players, one electric and one upright – in this case the phenomenal Ross Gallagher and Mali Obomsawin) as they evolve over the course of a piece. There’s a seamless flow of through-composed and improvised passages; after an improvised section, the return to a composed melodic figure registers as a profound arrival point.

Fisher-Lochhead began his first iteration of this project in 2013. At the time, he says:

“The forming of the group felt both big and small to me. Small because it started just by inviting friends over to read some new music I had written, and because we primarily played house shows, basement shows, mostly DIY situations. It was big because it felt like I had found a medium in which I could say everything I wanted to say, and explore music with my bandmates in a way that felt real, honest, and relevant to my experience. After I moved to Maine in 2015 I felt in some ways like I had to start from scratch, both to build up new musical relationships, but also to re-situate myself spiritually and socially in my new home, to see what’s what. By 2023 not only had I met a number of musicians who inspired me, but I was hungry again to be working in this medium. I had been working primarily in smaller, pared down settings for several years, and extracting everything I could from these arrangements, but the expansiveness of this kind of group kept calling me back.”

Raised in New York City in a family of musicians and music theorists, Fisher-Lochhead was exposed from early on to a wide range of musical voices and vocabularies, from modernism, minimalism and the avant garde to jazz in all its forms. As a child navigating the New York subway system with a cello exactly his size and as a pre-teen discovering his love and affinity for the alto saxophone, music was already part of the fabric of his everyday life. Perhaps this diversity of early influences informed the openness of Fisher-Lochhead’s musical landscapes and his fluent movement between different ecosystems of sound.

“Like many people of my generation, the music I make has been informed by a huge diversity of sources, both musical and otherwise, and I see this record as part of the continuing project of assimilating all of these inputs into a coherent style.”

The ensemble is made up of seasoned Maine professionals: Emma Stanley (trumpet; Flugelhorn); Ryan Blotnick (guitar); Ross Gallagher (electric bass); Mali Obomsawin (upright bass); Brian Shankar Adler (drums/ percussion); Alex Truelove (trombone); Aaron Henry (bass clarinet / tenor sax); Danny Fisher-Lochhead (alto sax).