Bruce L. Gallanter
Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter
June 2007

Connie Crothers Quartet - Music is a Place [New Artists 1043; USA] Featuring Connie Crothers on piano, Richard Tabnik on alto sax, Ratzo Harris on bass and Roger Mancuso on drums. Although pianist and composer Connie Crothers studied with the influential pianist/composer/philosopher Lennie Tristano so many years ago, she continues to be associated with Tristano and his other students or collaborators. The thing is, Ms. Crothers has continued to evolve and has some dozen discs out as a leader. Each one a worthy gem to consider. She has worked with members of this great quartet for quite a long time, Tabnik for 25 years and Mancuso for 35 years. This particular quartet has worked together weekly for the past five years. You can hear the proof in the pudding as there is a special bond that links this group together. Each of the seven pieces was composed by members of the quartet and each is special in a different way. “Helen’s Tune” has an odd structure that keeps shifting in different sections as if there are a couple of subgroups at work. It is both playful and slightly bent at the same time. Tabnik reminds me of Lee Konitz at times and Jackie McLean at other times with his unpredictable solos. Connie’s has a certain elegance and sophistication that puts her in a class by itself, she sounds like no one else but herself.

Another thing that makes this quartet so special is the way they all flow together, they have the dreamlike feel that reminds me of Miles’ rhythm team for the mid-sixties with Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Often Connie’s solos move in unlikely ways, starting in one direction and then adding layers of lines that she plucks from another realm, similar to the way Sun Ra often pulls rabbits our of hat or space-cap. It is rare at the store that Mike lets me leave on an entire 60+ minute jazz disc that we both find inventive and interesting throughout when we are working together, but this disc meets both of our high standards.

Stuart Broomer
Signal To Noise, Issue #48, page 75
Winter 2008

The modern jazz that first strikes the imagination is both random and organized, chaotic but unified, the entrance to another world. It is the modern jazz that I long for, that I know I've heard, but it's dimmed by too much knowledge of too many details, just as the current "mainstream" is murdered by its text book solutions, its pained historicism, or its ambitions to be "concert music," yet another level of commodity. By contrast, that mythical modern jazz would appear to the ear as continuously developing harmony rather than the reiteration of a popular song's pattern. The modern jazz I want, which is almost entirely telepathic, still has codes beyond my reach, while it attains a kind of perfect abstraction and collectivism, voices independently creating lines that somehow entwine and comment on one another. One imagines the underlying pattern disappearing afterward, indivisible from the creation of the piece. Now that's a music I hardly ever hope to hear because it repeats not a music, but an innocence of ear that should be beyond me. But I hear it in the music of the Connie Crothers Quartet which manages to balance traditional patterns and free improvisation in a way that is mysterious, magical and brilliant, in a way that clearly advances the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh school of linear abstraction without in anyway repeating it. Crothers is a stunning pianist, and the sudden traceries of "New York in the Blue Hour" would alone suffice to make her one of the most interesting pianists in jazz, her chordings a loose physical movement in which the fingers are part of a continuum rather than mere independent mechanism. A shared state of musical mind that unites Crothers with altoist Richard Tabnik (stunningly speech-like, like Coleman or Konitz; his upper-register chatter demands a hearing), bassist Ratzo Harris (a darting intelligence) and drummer Roger Mancuso (creating a streetscape of multiple exchanges), an intimacy so highly developed that you can turn to the back tray liner and expect a single composer only to find four, and vice versa. Music is a Place is work of continuous invention and dialogue, of shifting voices and sudden solo extrapolations; it's music that always feels as organized as bop, but it also sounds as loose as the best free jazz.