Eleven Cages

SSC1442 2017-06-02

Track List

1. Roadrunner
2. Minor Fall
3. 547
4. Cage Free I
5. Converge
6. Hindi Hex
7. Little Princess
8. Cage Free II
9. Single Ladies
10. For It
11. I Loves You Porgy

Musicians

Dan Tepfer - piano
Thomas Morgan - bass
Nate Wood - drums

Dan Tepfer — whom New York magazine dubbed “one of the moment’s most adventurous and relevant musicians” — has criss-crossed the globe over the past several years. The broad success of the pianist’s 2011 album Goldberg Variations / Variations — an improvisational exploration of J.S. Bach’s masterpiece — led to packed concerts from London’s Wigmore Hall, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival and SF Jazz in San Francisco to events in Berlin, Prague, Tokyo, Vancouver and Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge, with The New York Times declaring the latter performance “riveting and inspiring.” Tepfer followed that with Small Constructions, a studio-savvy 2013 album with reed player Ben Wendel, as well as his ongoing collaboration with sax icon Lee Konitz. Then there was Tepfer’s composing of fractal music for classical groups and his fascinating algorithmic music project, Acoustic Informatics. Now — kicking off what will be one of his most productive years yet — Tepfer presents Eleven Cages, a trio album with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Nate Wood to be released by Sunnyside Records on June 2, 2017. The seemingly telepathic trio performs a sequence of hook-heavy Tepfer originals, two free-improv pieces and irresistible interpretations of a classic ballad (Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy”) and an iconic pop hit (Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”).

Eleven Cages features Tepfer returning to the jazz piano trio format for the first time since the 2010 album Five Pedals Deep (a Sunnyside release with Thomas Morgan and Ted Poor). According to The New York Times review, Five Pedals Deep saw Tepfer “unfurl his lyricism in great silvery arcs.” All Music Guide described the album as “inventive” and “intense,” while Stereophile judged it simply “beautiful.” For Eleven Cages, Tepfer sought to explore the concept of freedom within boundaries, as well as the malleability of time in music. The pianist — bred to blend his right brain and left brain with rare parity — began classical piano studies at age 6 at the Paris Conservatoire-Paul Dukas. But he took a circuitous route to a jazz career, first earning a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Scotland’s University of Edinburgh (with his thesis on “Numerical Simulations of Galactic Superwinds”). After playing extensively on the jazz scene in college and even enjoying a brief stint as an opera conductor, he graduated in 2005 from Boston’s New England Conservatory, completing his masters under the guidance of Danilo Perez. The acclaimed recordings, prize-winning performances and adventurous collaborations that have followed only underscore the fact that Tepfer is an ambitious thinker in music.

In his liner notes to Eleven Cages, Tepfer says: “There’s something about cages that magnifies freedom… Constraints surround freedom and give it a frame, be they physical cages or a formal structure we choose to create within. They challenge us to ask: How free I can be inside this particular cage? How much wiggle room is there? At the end of the day, we are all encaged in some way — by the limits of our bodies, of our minds, of the political system we find ourselves in. The best we can do is find the wiggle room, and use it.” Relating this to the album’s two interpretive pieces, Tepfer writes: “In both ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and ‘Single Ladies,’ the two covers on this record, relationships are cages, too. In the first, written by men, Porgy wants to settle down, but Bess needs to fly; in the second, co-written by Beyoncé, a woman chides a man for not taking the chance to commit when he could have. Both songs portray love as something of a brutal business: You’re either in a cage or breaking out of it.”

Discussing his original pieces for the trio, Tepfer says: “The common thread of my own compositions here is the malleability of time, the possibility of stretching and fracturing it. In ‘Roadrunner,’ a cliché rock groove is subtly fractured, beats added, then taken away, like looking at a known object through refracting glass. In ‘Little Princess,’ a chromatic descending bass line is ceaselessly compressed and expanded, ultimately to a near breaking point. ‘Hindi Hex’ uses a tihai, a traditional North Indian form in which an intricate rhythmic pattern is repeated three times, and displaces it over a shifting background of major and minor triads. In ‘547,’ four beats are alternately stretched over five and seven, and later over six, nine and eleven. I find the cross-rhythms this creates fascinating. Beyond the appeal of the sound of these transformations, the challenges these tunes present — the particular cages they put us in — focus our attention as players when we’re improvising over them, forcing us to fight for our freedom. There’s something about high-wire acts that engages both the mind and the heart.”