Symbols of Light (A Solution)

Symbols of Light (A Solution)

ASIN: B00005MAG6

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The strings and sax format has been utilized by a number of jazz greats, from Charlie Parker to Stan Getz and now alto and soprano saxophonist Greg Osby. He's working with a combo featuring the young piano whiz Jason Moran, augmented by a string quartet, which complements the leader's atmospheric and snaky sax lines. The compositions exhibit a beautiful blend of the compositional and improvisational genius of Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Henry Threadgill, Wayne Shorter, and Muhal Richard Abrams. That blend is heard on the evocative, impressionistic expressions of "M" and the anthemic "Repay in Kind." The standard "Wild Is the Wind" is reborn with a darker harmonic hue. The strings supply Osby's songs with ethereal, classically tinged textured expressions. Osby plays, arranges, and composes with imagination and ingenuity--and the best is yet to come. --Eugene Holley Jr.

Product Description
Thunderstorm. Experience the rapture of nature's own symphony, the celestial sounds of the thunderstorm. The night sky lights up, the rain begins to fall, and you slowly drift into a sense of peace, sell-bing and total relaxation.

Tracks:

3 For Civility
Repay In Kind
'M'
The Keep
Golden Sunset
This Is Bliss
One Room
Northbound
Wild Is The Wind
Social Order
Minstrale Again (The Barefoot Tap Dance)

Product Description

Thunderstorm. Experience the rapture of nature's own symphony, the celestial sounds of the thunderstorm. The night sky lights up, the rain begins to fall, and you slowly drift into a sense of peace, sell-bing and total relaxation.

Amazon.com

The strings and sax format has been utilized by a number of jazz greats, from Charlie Parker to Stan Getz and now alto and soprano saxophonist Greg Osby. He's working with a combo featuring the young piano whiz Jason Moran, augmented by a string quartet, which complements the leader's atmospheric and snaky sax lines. The compositions exhibit a beautiful blend of the compositional and improvisational genius of Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Henry Threadgill, Wayne Shorter, and Muhal Richard Abrams. That blend is heard on the evocative, impressionistic expressions of "M" and the anthemic "Repay in Kind." The standard "Wild Is the Wind" is reborn with a darker harmonic hue. The strings supply Osby's songs with ethereal, classically tinged textured expressions. Osby plays, arranges, and composes with imagination and ingenuity--and the best is yet to come. --Eugene Holley Jr.

Customer Reviews:

ASTONISHING........2006-08-22

This might be the most amazing thing I've ever heard. It's innovative in every aspect. The instruments fuse so tightly and take you for a ride on every tune. This is some of the most fierce, focused, inspriringly intense, and lyrically satisfying playing I've ever heard. I've never seen Osby live, but I could imagine it's amazing. It's truly magical how everything clicks. Marlon Browden and Scott Colley loosely cradle the group. These men and women believe in the music and play as if they knew death would take each one immediately after the session. One Room is a highlight as it's form evokes a scattered urgency shared by everyone present. Northbound is simply terrifying. Every tune has so many specific emotional layers. Probably the best fusion of strings and a jazz combo I've ever heard. Well-arranged and performed. This record is reckless, relentless, and flawless. I need to stop writing about it and listen to absorb it again. The music grows on you. I'll be back.

Vastly satisfying.......2004-09-17

Wow! I was afraid this was another syrupy sax and strings album, but I was so wrong! This is tough, uncompromising, soulful jazz, complemented by a string quartet of considerable jazz imporvisational skill. Great compositions, great arrangements, and great improvising, from all the members, and especially Greg Osby, one of the most important jazz musicians alive today.

The Best Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year.......2002-07-11

The title says for itself. The best album of the year.

Layered sound.......2002-02-04

I bought this, my first Osby, because I needed something to get me out of a listening rut. I'm no musician and I have no idea what I'm talking about but here's what I heard. There are two separate tunes layered over the percussion. Tune 1: Melodic, expressive, vocal qualities, often flute or alto. No obvious key signature. Unresolved wandering. Well phrased. Tune 2: A different set of keys. Often synthesizer. Different phrasing patterns from tune 2. The two tunes are not obviously related but they are somehow complementary. Underneath both tunes, the rhythm is on a different wavelength entirely. Drums and bass. The three layers are just not traditionally blended but get along remarkably well. Overall then, you get three experiences for the price of one, the way I see it. While listening I am actively moving among all three layers, as if constantly changing focus from microstructure to macrostructure. Like looking at a city from a high observation deck then being in that city in a taxi. It is endlessly fascinating but but not background music. I play it for a few hours about once a month and enjoy it every time.

For a New Generation, A Kind of Blue.......2001-12-16

Invoke Kind of Blue and I suppose you've aroused a distinct category of expectations. EVERYone knows (and owns) Miles' masterwork (even if it's the only jazz disc in his/her collection). But apart from jazz devotees, who knows Greg Osby? If everything were right in the world, EVERYone would know Greg Osby as well.

How tired are you of hearing Kind of Blue is "the most beautiful jazz recording ever made"? I surmise we all have candidates for that claim (and several by Davis sidemen from the Blue sessions). But listeners with ears trained for music of the year 2001 have Symbols of Light (A Solution), an adventurously ambitious, achingly beautiful jazz recording that is surely the loveliest I've heard this year (and I can think of few rivals from earlier years). Although I emphasize "jazz"-for it is such--all the references I want to make are to classical performance. Osby's music here contains passages of almost Mendelssohnian lyricism-or Mendelssohn in American dress, as in Barber's Adagio or Violin Concerto. It has agitated passages that are reminiscent of early and late Stravinsky (see track two, pianist Jason Moran's "Repay in Kind.") Its individual tracks have a shapeliness, an architectonic pleasingness, that I find rare in most contemporary jazz (that's not merely of the neo-bop, hard bop variety) or contemporary "classical" composition.

Symbols of Light (A Solution)-and what IS it with this title? Osby tours this music as Greg Osby and Symbols of Light, so is the quartet Symbols of Light and the album title (A Solution)? We get no help from the liner notes-fits my colloquial understanding of "American Classical Music." It is idiomatically All American. It is serious without being self conscious. It is music to live with, to revisit and explore, and it rewards upon relistening, in different ways each time. It is deep, and contemporary-Osby makes few concessions to those who crave the sounds of yore--but accessible. It evokes "higher sensibilities." The players perform with uncanny precision-even in blistering improvisation, all the notes sound "just so," inevitable, perfect. And even as Osby and company swing like a (...)--thank you for that, too, Miles-"A Solution" brings to mind a range of classical references (I defy anyone who has ever listened to the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra to listen to Osby's "Northbound" (track 8) and not hear Bartok's opening paraphrased in jazz idiom.) A Solution would be as perfectly at home in a concert hall as in a jazz club (overpriced drinks, bad tables, condescending servers, and all).

Above all, this for me is New York City music, which in the last month of 2001 has a very particular meaning. In my ears, it is Osby's sensuous vibrato, which seems to echo down empty rain-slicked, neon-reflecting streets, that most draws me into the sounds of the Great City. Osby seems to catche the complexity-the turbulence and peacefulness, beauty and brutality, the richness and, yes, the pain-of New York. The first track in particular, "3 for Civility"-which begins with the marvelous Moran, hesitant, picking his way tentatively through opening chords and bringing to mind the daybreak stirrings of the city-has in places a dirge-like quality, with strings moving powerfully through slow sequences of dissolving chords, but also moments of soaring lyricism, speaking to me of Great City's inexorable triumph over its inevitable sorrows.

I suspect some may lose their way hereon a single unfocused listening, but I'll guess the first three tracks will convince most listeners they have something rare and beautiful in their possession, something that deserves respectful attention. The quality of musicianship alone is compelling: the players are all superb. Osby and Moran interact as though they share a mind-listen in particular to track 4, "The Keep." Both have the knack of mining inside of chordal structures and finding notes that seem not to have existed before their moment of discovery. And some of bassist Scott Colley's work reminded me of Scott La Faro's intuitive, technically brilliant runs against Bill Evans' piano. Marlon Bowden is a perfect complement and the most tasteful of percussionists (listen to his sweet cymbal work in the opening bars of track 6, "This is Bliss." Bliss indeed.)

God, I love this record. I hope many, many others will as well.

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