Dawn After Dawn - Home is Where You Are (577 Records, 2025)
Here we have the Maestro (saxophones, trumpet and piano) along with Aron Namenwirth (guitar, flute, percussion) and Jon Rosenberg (loops, effects), under the banner Dawn After Dawn. Aron and Jon have been friends since 2020 and played as a duo, Hall of Mirrors. How the duo became a trio is clearly explained on Bandcamp notes by Aron Namenwirth: “Find yourself lucky enough to have Daniel and Jon in a recording studio and some incredible guitars and pedals on a grand piano, incredible exchanges will happen. Then the engineer becomes a musician…”. Electronic loops and experimental nuances are interspersed with smooth, beautifully out of time, Dexter Gordon-esque sax lines, soon to be hijacked by noises or crashed by Jimi/Miles-wise telluric wah wah: as in any great record, no way to rest on a comfort spot. About the “cooking”, here is Brooklin-based audio engineer, Jon Rosenberg: “Between my love for dance music, the electric period of Miles Davis and music for films, I began to add samples of tonally and rhythmically centered material to see if, somehow, these two disparate types of music could be made to mesh into something unique in the listener’s mind”. Should we feel, as listeners, that the music depicts a borderless sense of freedom, we got the counter-evidence of this directly by Carter’s words: “Dawn After Dawn inspires me to be more free of being a saxophonist, so to speak, Seems there are certain requirements and expectations that can be suffocating, nerve wracking and confining in trying to be a saxophonist. I have, for a long time, periodically been inspired to play in the inner voices instead of playing what's going on”.
Sonic Chambers Quartet - Kiss of the Earth (577 Records, 2025)
Let’s grant Maestro Carter a little bit of well deserved relaxation and have a listen to this band co-led by New Orleans-based clarinetist and saxophonist Byron Asher and New York City-based saxophonist and clarinetist Tomas Majcherski. The multi-instrumentalists and composers have known each other and performed together for over 10 years, primarily in the New Orleans music scene, though their collaboration on this project only began in 2023. Studies in philosophy and religion, as well as working in avant garde theater, are part of their common upbringing and cemented their personal and artistic bond. The powerhouse of this debut release provided by Matt Booth from North Carolina on bass and Doug Garrison from New Orleans on drum, is blasting colorful and polyrhythmic patterns, setting the perfect frame for the warm, deep and intriguing textures put in place by the two reedists. Experimentation and avant-garde music find an exciting counterbalance in arrangements and sounds coordinates that moving the listener straight to European chamber music tradition, epitomized by Part One of the mighty Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, grinded and recast as “an improvisatory vehicle”, to borrow their own words. Recorded in rural southwestern Louisiana, Kiss Of the Earth sees at the mixing and production helm Brian Seeger, longtime compadre of the band.
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