Petite Oiseau: William Parker Quartet
Without a doubt, this is my pick for album of the year. I spent all of 2008 looking for something good and something different to get excited about. After many disappointments, Santa delivered a winner.
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Ok, yes, this is Jazz. Try to stifle your disappointments. ;-)
Petite Oiseau by the William Parker Quartet is excellent. Being strongly improvisational, it does tend toward free jazz. If you’re like me and someone says ‘free jazz’ you think of someone blowing a lot of random notes in some big painful solo. Petite Oiseau is NOT that. Amazingly, here is an improvisational quartet playing as a quartet of equals, all knitting together into something cohesive and inventive. The album also has that toe tapping, hard bop swing thing, mixed up with lots of shifts and polyrhythms. William Parker on bass, and Hamid Drake on percussion keep this album grooving and moving.
The album is tight, inventive, grooving, improvisational…very well produced…For me it’s that perfect blend of interesting provoking jazz, yet so easy to listen to you can just get lost in the feel.
There’s a nice review at this link
and an audio review at this NPR link
I’m uploading a track for the curious as a high-qual MP3. Talaps Theme (Track 2). It happens to be the shortest on the album.