Monday, January 9, 2017

USA: Craig Taborn- Daylight Ghosts (2016)

Craig Taborn: piano, electronics
Chris Speed: tenor saxophone, clarinet Chris Lightcap: bass
Dave King: drums


Keyboardist Craig Taborns Daylight Ghosts is the Minneapolis-bred New Yorkers third ECM release as a leader, a quartet album following the solo Avenging Angel and trio disc Chants.

Both projects earned wide acclaim, with The Guardian saying that Taborns musicality and his attention to detail are hypnotic, as is his remarkable sense of compositional narrative within an improvised performance.

Along with the questing Taborn on piano and electronic keyboards, the quartet of Daylight Ghosts features two other luminaries from the New York scene reed player Chris Speed and bassist Chris Lightcap plus drummer Dave King, the leaders fellow Minnesota native and one-third of alt-jazz trio The Bad Plus.

Each player draws from a broad artistic background, as informed by rock, electronica and diverse strains of world music as they are the various permutations of jazz improvisation. Dynamism and spectral ambience, acoustic and electric sounds, groove and lingering melody all come together to animate Daylight Ghosts.