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Projects Mark Dresser Trio: & Video Project The Mark Dresser Trio is Mark Dresser - bass, Matthias Ziegler - e. flutes, Denman Maroney - Hyperpiano. Each of these world class instrumentalists has advanced the techniques of their respective instruments. Together they explore new worlds of sound and intuitive collaboration. "Some musicians show a natural penchant for looking deep under the hood. They rummage around the tradition and the literal apparatus of their instrument to find musical inspiration. Mark Dresser is part of that world: his trio album, Aquifer is a formidable banquet of sonic data, tied together with a unique artistic logic. Dresser freely crosses over from jazz to new music and from improvisational to written music. Dresser continues to carefully and intelligently split the difference between various genres of music." - Josef Woodard, Jazz Times other reviews: for The Berkshire Web by Seth Rogovoy Another review Complete press packet Announcing Mark Dresser's Trio and Film/Video Project "Mark Dresser is an inventor. He also may be the most important bassist to emerge since 1980 in jazz or classical music." Boston Herald, February 1, 1998 The Mark Dresser Trio's program for the upcoming European tour is in two parts; the first half is a concert set and the second half consists of new contemporary silent videos with live music. "Subtonium" by the Kunst Brothers is a collaboration with acclaimed video artist Tom Leeser and celebrated sculptor Alison Saar. It was made expressly for Mr. Dresser's compositions of the same name (1998). "Sonomatopoeia," by Tom Leeser was also expressly made to Dresser's 2002 composition of the same name. "Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper," is an animated 16mm short by the gifted cinematographer, Sarah Jane Lapp. This piece is collaborative work which Mark Dresser performs the music alone with video. Mark Dresser's trio will also perform an original score for the historic collaboration of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, "Un Chien Andalou." This music was recorded on the 1998 Knitting Factory release "Eye'll Be Seeing You." Mark Dresser is acclaimed for his solo bass and ensemble performances which seamlessly integrate composition and improvisation. Since 1972, he has concertized throughout North America, Europe and the Far East. Mr. Dresser's working trio since 1997, includes Matthias Ziegler on multiple electro-acoustic flutes and Denman Maroney on hyperpiano. "Aquifer," is the latest trio CD on Cryptogramophone.(2002) chosen as one of the "Top 5 Jazz Albums of 2002" for the Japanese MUSIC MAGAZINE and one of ten best of 2002 by critic Jason Biven in Cadence Magazine For further information please contact: Mark Dresser T: 718 965 8575 F: 718 832 4934 e-mail: deldresser@aol.com Dear Fellow Programmers, I had the honor to host the Mark Dresser Trio in early February of this year and the evening was a huge success. They were absolutely fantastic. Their jazz/new-music style was a perfect companion to the four films they accompanied: "Un Chien Andalou," "Subtonium" and "Sonomatopei" by the Kunst Brothers and "Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper" by Sarah Jane Lapp. Mark was a delight to work with, as well as the other trio members Denman Maroney and Mathias Ziegler. We had a packed house, excellent press and media coverage, which is not surprising given Mark’s international reputation. He is a virtuoso contrabass player who’s performed with the likes of Black Music Infinity and the Anthony Braxton Quarter as well as Tambastics and Arcado. He has performed all over the world and has won numerous awards include two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. The Trio has recorded music for the "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and is working on other film collaborations. I can’t emphasize enough how stunning they were and how thrilled the patrons were to have witnessed such an amazing performance. I will be inviting them back for future events in the years to come. Sincerely, Vicki Woods Director Webster Film Series St. Louis, MO 314 968 7487 MARK DRESSER Emerging from the L.A. "free" jazz scene of the early 70's, Mark Dresser performed with the "Black Music Infinity", led by Stanley Crouch, and included Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, and James Newton. Concurrently he was performing with the San Diego Symphony. After completing B.A.and M.A. degrees at UCSD where he studied with contrabass virtuoso Bertram Turetzky and a 1983 Fulbright Fellowship in Italy with maestro Franco Petracchi, Dresser relocated to New York in 1986 after being invited to join the quartet of composer/saxophonist, Anthony Braxton. Dresser played with Braxton's longest performing quartet for nine years. Once in NY, Dresser began working with a wide variety of musicians in the greater New York community including Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, John Zorn, Dave Douglas and others. He focused on composing for a pair of cooperative groups, Tambastics with flutist Robert Dick, percussionist Gerry Hemingway, and pianist Denman Maroney and the string trio, ARCADO, with violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Hank Roberts. Numerous European tours, awards, six CD's, and several commissions resulted, including "For Not the Law," a composition for ARCADO and orchestra from WDR Radio of Cologne Germany, "Armadillo" for ARCADO and the WDR Big Band, and "Bosnia," a work written for the Trio du Clarinettes of France and ARCADO. His collaborative projects include a trio, C/D/E, with multi-reed player virtuoso, Marty Ehrlich and master drummer Andrew Cyrille, a duo with pianist Denman Maroney, the Marks Brothers Duo with fellow bassist Mark Helias, and the duo with the cello virtuoso, Frances-Marie Uitti.. In addition to his trio, his current project is the Mark Dresser's Modular Ensemble which performs his chamber works. He has composed and recorded original music for silent film including the German expressionist silent film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Knitting Factory) and the French Surrealist collaboration of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou. (Knitting Factory) Solo performance is one of Dresser's specialties. He has designed custom made electronics for purposes of amplifying normally inaudible sounds. "Invocation," (Knitting Factory) was his first solo CD documenting compositions from 1983-94(Knitting Factory). His recent solo compositions are included on "Marinade" (Tzadik-2000) Commissions include, "Banquet," a double concerto for various flutes, contrabass and string quartet written for Swiss flute virtuoso Matthias Ziegler.(Tzadik CD-1997) , "Air to Mir," commissioned by the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress (Marinade-Tzadik CD-2000.) "Althaus" is for tuba virtuoso, David LeClair with bass, cello, alto sax, and clarinet. (Marinade). HIs most recent commission, "Remudadero" is written for the saxophone quartet, "ROVA". A chapter on his extended techniques for contrabass, "A Personal Pedogogy,” appears in the book, ARCANA (Granary Books). Other articles on this research appear in DOWNBEAT, MUSICIAN MAGAZINE, & JAZZIZ. A 2002 Grammy nominee, Mark Dresser has performed and recorded with some of the strongest personalities in contemporary music and jazz including Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Jane Ira Bloom, Bobby Bradford, Tom Cora, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Davis, Dave Douglas, Fred Frith, Diamanda Galas, Vinny Golia, Osvaldo Golijov, Joe Lovanao,George Lewis, Misha Mengelberg, Ikue Mori, James Newton, Evan Parker, Sonny Simmons, Louis Sclavis, Vladimir Tarasov, Henry Threadgill, and John Zorn. He has given lecture demonstrations at the Julliard School, Princeton, New England Conservatory, National Superior Conservatory of Paris, UCSD, and others. QUOTES: "He has proven to be one of the master bassists of modern jazz, perhaps even the most exciting....his improvisational fecundity was remarkable for its veritable ensemble-in-miniature, in which every orchestral maneuver can be deployed to advantage... Dresser's rhythmic mooring, melodic liquidity, and timbral hues showed how sanguinely he absorbs and adapts available contexts, emotionally and generically. The almost palpable physicality of his pizzicato slaps and pedal plunging, the luxuriant tremolos of his arco passages and refrains, were as identifiable as the calling cues we associate with elder bass paragons." San Diego Reader "Mark Dresser is a bassist and composer of the highest order. On this recording of his "notated" chamber music, he presents two challenging works that are artistically interpreted. His creativity and sonic sensibilities need to be heard. This project, the assemblage of musicians, and this label make an important statement about the creative process... The performance is intriguing, engaging and profound. " Bass World, The Journal of the International Society of Bassists 1998 review of Banquet CD-Tzadik "To an experienced reviewer, it doesn't happen too often that the music makes you speechless. It might be due to the genre of the silent movie that its music is hard to verbalize; maybe the film itself can possibly describe this wonderful music. Mark Dresser not only pays homage to a great German movie and its expressionist director, Robert Wiene, but also makes a statement about Neo-Nationalism and the current ethnic cleansing all over the world...This is the masterpiece of a masterful musician..."JazzThetik on Mark Dresser's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" * * * * * "You've got to pity Dresser's poor bass-you wouldn't treat a dog the way he manhandles his instrument. But the gnarled tones and vicious swing he tortures out of it are worth the abuse. In Dresser's slanted compositions, the jazz tradition is only so much grist for the mill." The New Yorker, August 18, 1997 "Mark Dresser awed the assembly with his compositions for solo bass-no one expected to be nailed to the floor by one guy with a four-string." Los Angeles Times "Mr. Dresser, who constantly drove the group forward with his full, wide-bodied sound, would solo, hammering strings with both hands, creating the sound of several basses playing at once." N.Y. Times "In terms of the soloist/accompaniment dichotomy, Dresser explodes the notion of the bass as both single instrument and back-up instrument. His arco work takes on a progressively seamless singing quality while occasional overdubs allow pizzicato dancing around the bowed slipstream. Thus glissandi and pitch shifts are pocked and plunked and shoved in a sometimes delirious display of talent. But even when it's Dresser alone, sans overdubs, he's a feverish, fast-moving string group unto himself...I count this among the best anti-virtuosic solo recordings to date. Anti-virtuosic playing is, of course, historically a function of interrogating the inherited history of technique and beauty, and here Dresser presents an alarmingly tense and exciting technique and a sense of beauty as something not simply or clearly or calmly related but rather something for which all involved must work." Andrew Bartlett - 5/4 Magazine (Review of INVOCATION on Knitting Factory Works) "Dresser has a heroic sound and his double-, triple-, and quadruple-stopped glisses are stunning. ...he should sustain his position as one of the few virtuosos of so-called avant-garde jazz." Village Voice about the premier of "The Banquet" September '95 "Mark Dresser who is able to jump over the highest stylistic walls in a single bound wrote a concerto that shows where this journey between contemporary classical music and jazz can go. Dresser wrote a piece of music that fits like a glove to the astonishing soloist, Matthias Ziegler. This piece has many element which you can't find anymore in "serious" music like drama, entertainment, rhythmic playfulness, variety of sound, and room for individual improvisational development."-Neue Zurcher Zeitung "Mark Dresser's Promethean bass-playing powers one of the heaviest bands on the scene...Dresser consistently astonishes with his range of ideas and effects, not to mention his towering beat." Wire Magazine "Mr. Dresser, a basssist of dexterity and power, isn't content with dryly cerebral experimentation or some anachronistic idea of euphoria through tumult. He wants it all: timbral experimentation, pulsating rhythm, strong melodies, imaginative strategies for composing. ...his well-rehearsedgroup, swinging four-way cohesion was always the issue." New York Times, May 30, 1997 "Mark Dresser first came to national attention in 1985 as the bass player for Anthony Braxton's now legendary quartet. The band broke up in 1994 but Dresser continues to further the vocabulary of the acoustic bass through his eccentric and radical advancements in technique." Jazziz-The 150 Most Influential Artists who Moved Jazz's Changes Since 1983. September, 1988 DENMAN MARONEY Denman Maroney composes and plays "hyperpiano," which involves stopping, sliding, bowing, plucking, strumming the piano strings with various objects — bars, bowls, knives, bells and mashers of metal, boxes and bottles of plastic, mallets of various kinds, and blocks of rubber independently of or (more often) in conjunction with regular keyboard action. According to Wolf Kampmann of JazzThetik, "[K]eyboard genius Denman Maroney... [is] able to create and unfold a spectrum of sounds that range from new music to free jazz... The piano is so much estranged [sic] that it gives you the full array of sounds. Once again, Denman Maroney seems to be the only slide pianist worth mentioning." Chillingly good solo prepared piano." Jeff Gibson, Other Music "Maroney, who concentrates on prepared piano playing rather than doing it occasionally, is far more sophisticated than most."Harvey Pekar, Downbeat "In an ongoing work called 'Music for Unprepared Piano,' Maroney whangs the strings of his Steinway L with glockenspiel tuning keys, savages them with butter knives, and diddles them with a potato masher. On occasion, he'll wiggle the ends of marimba mallets against the soundboard to evoke barking seals. At other times, he'll drop salad bowls onto the piano harp, dramatizing their reverberations with judicious pedaling or setting them jogging across the strings with tommy gun trills. Twitching with melodic tics, bewitched by detail and density, 'Unprepared Piano' is mood music for obsessive compulsives." Mark Dery, Keyboard "I have always been both fascinated and perplexed by all of the unique sounds [Maroney] gets. Hyperpiano is… in a world of its own. There are three 20 plus minute pieces found here and each explores new realms of inner piano weirdness. Each piece involves a specific idea to explore. Flux Time utilizes three tempos simultaneously, but sounds like a music box breaking down, going in different directions at the same time. Artemisia involves moving objects across the piano strings, producing high end spirits whispering mysterious clouds of fractured notes. Pretty scary at times. On the Contrary employs sliding objects along the strings, rumbling through a dark terrain, ancient ruins uncovered, myths revealed." Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter Maroney's recording credits include: Tambastics (Music & Arts 704) with Robert Dick (flutes), Mark Dresser (bass) and Gerry Hemingway (percussion); Mark Dresser's Force Green (Soul Note 121273-2) with Theo Bleckman (voice), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Mark Dresser (bass) and Phil Haynes (drums); and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Knitting Factory Works 155) with Mark Dresser (bass) and Dave Douglas (trumpet). Maroney has just released a CD Hyperpiano (Mon$ey Music) of his own piano works. Other recordings to his credit include the Roulette Intermedium compilation A Confederacy of Dances Vol. 2 (Einstein Records EIN003) with Earl Howard (electronics) and Stockhausen Performed by the Negative Band (Finnadar SR-9009) with Earl Howard (alto saxophone), Carl Stone (electronics), J. Paul Taylor (electronics), David Simons (percussion), Jon Weisberger (electronics) and Mike Fink (percussion). Maroney has an MFA in composition from California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with James Tenney, Steven Mosko and Alan Chaplin among others. MATTHIAS ZIEGLER Matthias Ziegler is one of the world's most versatile and innovative flutists. He is committed both to the traditional literature for flute as well as to contemporary music and concepts that cross the boundaries between classical music and jazz. Accordingly, his performances take place in a vast range of contexts: he plays principal flute with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, has toured with the percussionist Pierre Favre and performed with the pianist George Gruntz as well as with the American contrabass player Mark Dresser. He is also a member of the Collegium Novum Zurich", where he has worked with Mauricio Kagel, Heinz Holliger and George Crumb. Concert tours have brought him to the US, Japan, Australia, South America and Israel. Many recordings on CD document his inclusive musical interests. Matthias Ziegler currently teaches at the Musikhochschule Winterthur Zurich. Searching for new sounds he enormously broadened the expressive potential of the traditional flute and the electroacoustically amplified contrabass flute. His solo music has been recorded on Uakti, (New Albion). Amplifying the flute allows him to increase the volume of the microsound structures of the flute to an audible level. Inspired by the new dimension of sounds of these instruments, composers such as Michael Jarrell from Switzerland, Benjamin Yusupov from Tadjikistan, Matthias Ruegg from the Vienna Art Orchestra and the American Mark Dresser wrote flute concertos for him. ("Banquet"-Tzadik CD) Matthias Ziegler performs on a flute manufactured by Louis Lot (1880), on a quartertone flute Brannen/Kingma system , on a Alto- and Bassflute by Eva Kingma (Holland) as well as on his own invention, the "Matusiflute", a uniquely designed instrument with a vibrating membrane. His contrabassflute has been constructed by Kotato Fukushima (Japan). QUOTES "Virtuoso Ziegler's vision of a solo polyphonic music makes this the ulttimate flute record. The Wire Magazine on "Uakti" "... step aside and make room for someone with real talent." Fanfare Magazine (USA) "It was the most staggering and unique flute playing I've heard for a very long time and words cannot describe the variety of sounds and techniques that Matthias Ziegler produces. If you ever get a chance to hear him, do not miss it" Adrian Brett-Flutewise review of concert at the Barbican Center London. "This CD is just great. Definitely the best of this sort I have heard so far" James Galway on Zieglers solo CD, "Marsyas Song "Extended techniques are integrated nto a complete, unified musical vision, and that vision is most often magnificent and sumptuous. Ziegler is clearly a gifted musician, one whose skill and art come together to yield transcendent and glorious music" The Wire TOM LEESER & THE KUNST BROTHERS The Kunst Brothers is a collaboration between sculptor Alison Saar and digitial artist Tom Leeser. Working from a basis of combining opposites, they bring together the analog world of physical materials and the digital world of moving images and sound. The work involves the transformation of existing spaces through the art of installation. Tom Leeser is a film and video artist working with digital multimedia and interdisplinary Arts at California Institute of the Arts.His work has been shown at the Bronx Museusm of Art, the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, Millenium, Canyon Cinema, Chicago Art Institute, Siggraph and numerous film and video festivals worldwide. Alison Saar works in sculpture and installation. She is currently represented by Phylis Kind Gallery in NYC and Jan Baum Gallery in LA. She has exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum, the High Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Brothers have been involved with public installations for group shows such as "New Urban Landscape" in 1988, "Automotive Votive", in 1989 and "Angels at the Crossroads" in 1990. In 1999 the Kunst Brothers collaborated on "Travelling Light", a sculpture/video installation for the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles. SARAH JANE LAPP Sarah Jane Lapp was born in Minneapolis in 1972.Her last compilation of 16 & 35mmfilms explored the intersection of comic impulse and the religious imagination of displaced persons. She combines hand-drawn animation (ink and gouache) with verite and narrative scenarios. Her films have been made possible by grants/fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, J. William Fulbright Commission, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Artslink, Civitella Ranieri/Atlanta Center for the Arts, the Anderson Center and the MacDowell Colony. Filmography: #30, HAPPY ARE THE HAPPY(Your best joke, please), THE NEIGHBORHOOD CAT, REVISED LESSON PLAN FOR PRIVATE KIM JAE WON, MIMO, RAJ, MANTAN ELOKUVAVIIKKO, GAELLA: BITUL 1994 Past screenings venues include: Kino Arsenal/Berlin, B Cinema/Hamburg, Schedhalle Museum/Zurich, British Film Institute/London, Brno 16, Pacific Film Archive, ATA, San Francisco Cinematheque, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Ocularis, Robert Beck Memorial Cinema/New York, Chicago Filmmakers, SXSW Film Festival/Austin, Walker Art Center/Minneapolis, others. Film Awards: Black Maria Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Judah L. Magnes Museum Experimenal Film Award, Student Academy Award Regional Winner TECH REQUIREMENTS Piano- baby grand or grand piano. No uprights. PA system including 2 monitors and 4 high quality microphones. PA system must have Phantom power. One bass speaker box with a single 12" preferred speaker. Electro Voice, JBL, Gallien Kreuger, and Trace Elliot are acceptable brands. A 15" speaker is also acceptable. Three music stands with lights. Large Screen BETACAM SP (preferred) or VHS video player, projector and screen. We request two extra t.v. monitors (if possible) so we can watch the video without turning our backs to the audience. 35 mm projector for “Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper” REVIEWS The Berkshire Eagle Entertainment Wednesday, April 19, 2000 “Mark Dresser and his innovative trio travel to the cutting edge and beyond By Seth Rogovay NORTH ADAMS- The 1929 silent film classic "Un Chien Andalou" by Luis Bunuel and Salvadore Dali has finally gotten the original score the cinematic landmark deserves. Bunuel and Dali's uniquely disturbing and provocative vision could not have been better served than it has by composer Mark Dresser and his innovative trio. Like Bunuel and Dali did in their chosen form, Dresser and his trio take the raw tools of their chosen form, in this case the musical instruments and the basic rules of composition and improvisation, and explode and invert them to explore what's typically hidden or overlooked in performance and composition. The result is like "Un Chien Andalou," a subterranean voyage, this case a sonic one, although at times the music strikes with such visceral shock and force that to insist on thinking of it only as sound to the exclusion of other sensations is in itself a limiting point of view. As heard on Saturday night at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art's B-1- Theater-a venue that is fast becoming a have for the most experimental cutting-edge art ever seen or heard in the Berkshires and, indeed, far beyond-Dresser's trio is about nothing if not pushing limits. The sum effect, and this was just the first half-minute of "FLBP," was what one might imagine the "music of the spheres" to sound like-the music of air or space itself, with high-pitched sounds evoking arcs of light from distant stars. Soon Ziegler brought the piece back to earth playing, of all things, what sounded like percussion. Indeed, anyone who thinks that percussion is limited to drums, or that percussion is not a form of melody, should hear the Dresser trio. At various times each instrumentalist assumed the role of what we conventionally understand to be percussion and then they manipulated that percussive element to suggest a melody. These sorts of revelations were sprinkled thoughout Dresser's two-hour program. His "Digestivo," an excerpt from a larger work called "Banquet," was a kind of inverted pop tune, with inklings of early jazz, blues, and Thelonius Monk occasionally surfacing through the gauzy scrim of dissonance. Maroney's two-handed melody gave each not an odd, crippled twin, as if they were meant to by played together by could never get in sequence. Dresser was an aggressive soloist, leaning into his instrument, spinning it and dancing with it, slapping it stroking it, chording it, pulling the strings and singing with it. DAILY FREEMAN LIFE Tuesday, April 18, 2000 Dresser & Co. put minds in motion 'It's where they're coming from-a place in the timeless that is unlimited, though informed by, country of origin and musical pedigree.' WOODSTOCK-About a half a dozen unmeasured measures into contrabasso Mark Dresser's first composition at the Kleinert-Juames Art Center Friday night, the mind movies started.With Dresser assisted by sonic masters Matthias Ziegler and Denman Maroney on flutes and tampered piano, weird images drawn from the abyss of inner space and the cosmic infinite drifted across consciousness, gathering and dissolving like eddies of smoke, with the listener a transfixed, sensate screen. CD Review All Music Guide "As a composer Mark Dresser walks no lines; he enters and exits the musical body without regard for boundaries or conventions imposed from outside his musical view. As a soloist, improviser, and bandleader, Dresser is well-known for turning the musical tract inside out in order to get what he needs from his instrument, his ensemble, or a particular piece of music. On Aquifer, his second album as a leader for the now-venerable Cryptogramphone label, Dresser uses the title as a veil-lifting exercise on what it is this ensemble does with music. They act as the ground from which all force is created. They are unchanging and look at everything with equanimity, yet, based on the dictates of a particular composition or interaction, cause chain reactions of force, silence, ebb, and flow with each movement or consideration. Here with Mathias Ziegler, with the entire family of flutes played electro-acoustically and the hyper piano of Denman Maroney, the ensemble charts more unknown, perhaps unknowable territory while keeping their focus on the axis of purely musical expression. That musical expression finds its means of erudition in the array of sounds this trio is capable of dredging out of the creative heart. Where the jazz and blues of Horace Silver are tracked via Jaki Byard on "Digestivo," so are serial components à la Alban Berg. "Digestivo" and "Modern Pine," which closes the album, have been performed quite extensively by Dresser with Mark Helias, but the textured sounds of the flutes and the angular piano of Maroney create a depth and dimension that the originals didn't touch. Ideas here, in both structure and improvisation, don't drone or breathe; they all have edges and move through their chosen frameworks with deceptive ease. The abstracted soundscapes on "Sonomatopoeia" give way effortlessly toward poetically inspired compositional sketches that are precise and expansive having integrated the sonic palette. Where improvisation is called for in order to reveal the invisible foundations of a particular musical notion, as on the title track, it sidles the premise of an integral, interchangeable sonic and sonant amalgam of cooperative sound exchanges that shore the idea while making its utterances so vast they are almost unspeakable. Mark Dresser hasn't missed in his quest to integrate all the values of sound and music creation into a refracted, prismatic whole, and the Aquifer trio is a band whose potentials have merely been tapped here." ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide Dusted On Line Zine by By Charlie Wilmoth "Dresser Trio Crafts Evocative, Cinematic Jazz" I'm sure plenty of avant-jazz records have been made with the flute/piano/bass line-up, but offhand I can't think of any, and maybe there's a reason for that, besides the practical one that most jazz flautists also play sax. Bass, piano and flute are almost comically different from one another in a number of important ways, such as range, timbre, and attack (the initial sound heard when a note is played). Although it's reductionist, a useful criterion for judging Mark Dresser's new Aquifer might be the following: A successful flute-piano-bass record necessitates either a unique approach to orchestration or a willingness to present the differences among the instruments in a humorous way. Aquifer isn't overtly humorous, so the first part of the criterion is the more relevant one here. If Dresser was thinking as much about orchestration as I am, he could hardly have picked better players: Ziegler coaxes a surprising array of sounds from a wide variety of traditional and nontraditional flutes, and Maroney is capable of unbelievably bizarre and eerie noises at the piano. Dresser, who's played with Tim Berne, Anthony Davis and most famously in Anthony Braxton's '80s quartet with Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway, is himself a fantastic bassist who's mastered the extended technique of his instrument by way of free jazz and the postwar avant-garde.