Featured Artist: Stephen Gauci Quartet

CD Title: Absolute, absolutely

Year: 2008

Record Label: CIMP

Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde

Review:

Per the liners, saxophonist Stephen Gauci has accelerated his group-led and sideman based career, largely since 2004 through the present.  His new 2008 release with estimable company, boasts a consortium of ideas and slants on the jazz genre.  Moreover, Gauci is looming as one of those artists where expectations remain high, since his recent output is reliably entertaining and undeniably, cutting-edge in execution and scope.

Gauci and trumpeter Nate Wooley are firebrands here.  And of course the all-world rhythm section of bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Lou Grassi pronounce a semblance of fire and brimstone.  With zippy bop forays, torrid swing vamps and an abundance of dynamics throughout, the quartet aims high and wins big. 

The hornists’ generate lots of high-heat via sonorous extended note choruses and emotive diversions that often wiz by.  Moreover, the rhythm section generates a crash-course methodology based upon blistering patterns and cascading pulses.  On “Nothing back here (I can’t find a thing)," Gauci and Wooley dish out a sizzling free-jazz jamboree, subsided by the latter’s weeping notes. 

At times, the quartet conjures up notions of angst and frustration, which perhaps mirrors the cycle of life.  But they soften the pot some with a West Coast-cool type piece titled “Wei Wu’s Way.”  No doubt, Gauci and associates deliver that proverbial knockout blow during this energized outing, that is engineered with a easily discernible sense of authority.

Record Label Website: http://www.cimprecords.com

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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