The New York Times
Published: March 22, 2004

CD Review

By BEN RATLIFF

'I, Claudia'
Claudia Quintet

John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet gives off a slinkier, mistier feeling than Mr. Charlap's trio. That's mostly a function of instrumentation, which tends here toward the mellower end of the spectrum. Vibraphone and xylophone (Matt Moran), accordion (Ted Reichman) and clarinet (Chris Speed) play principal roles, and the parts of the band shift around like tectonic plates. In a typical chunk of the group's new album, "I, Claudia" (Cunieform), an ostinato figure on the vibraphone gradually gives way to clarinet and accordion; there's a sliding-off into kind of sound-soup, and then a redeveloped version of the vamp begins again.

Nobody promised you this would be jazz; it just happens that most of the musicians in the band have their training in that area, so you get the vestigial feeling of jazz from the tone of Drew Gress's acoustic bass, Mr. Moran's occasional harmonic improvisations in a given rhythm and Mr. Hollenbeck's use of brushes.

Instead of swing, the pulse tends toward the even, hammering one of baroque, Eastern European folk dance, Philip Glass and drum-and-bass. But sometimes it's slow funk. And sometimes there's no pulse at all. A track called "Can You Get Through This Life With a Good Heart?" begins with discrete chord clouds, a little bit after the style of Morton Feldman, joined together by some sort of buttery radio-transmitter static.

Whatever it is, Mr. Hollenbeck has gotten at a special group sound, and he's such a sensitive, technically deft drummer — you notice the steadiness of his timekeeping right away — that his music can just be what he wants it to be; it's curious, and sometimes lightly funny without sour, satiric edges. It doesn't need alignments with jazz or rock or anything else to vindicate itself.





Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita for jazzreview.com

Musicians: John Hollenbeck (drums, composition), Drew Gress (acoustic bass), Matt Moran (vibraphone, percussion), Chris Speed (clarinet, tenor sax), Ted Reichman (accordion)

Review: Whether in a supporting role or as a leader, John Hollenbeck’s method of jazz drumming is unequal parts exactitude, and wit, enhanced by a polyrhythmic composure. However, he supplants these attributes with a spunky and rather spirited compositionally minded disposition. On this truly wonderful outing, the drummer’s cleverly performed grooves provide a clearly definable spark for the soloists’ various maneuvers. On the opener “Just Like Him,” Hollenbeck and bassist Drew Grass lay down a perky ostinato motif. Here, Chris Speed’s lilting clarinet lines and Matt Moran’s soft vibes offer flotation-like qualities as the band subtly shifts the pulse amid airy dreamscapes.
Ted Reichman’s oscillating accordion work on the piece titled “Opening,” tenders a semblance of an electronic element, whereas the band often conjures up an aura, befitting children at play. The musicians’ inject charm and wit into these cyclically generated works. It’s like clockwork! As a portion of these semi-structured themes ring up notions of ethereal vistas and cautiously enacted sojourns. Ultimately, Hollenbeck’s lighthearted compositional style suggests a trance-like state that moves through an aggregation of linearly devised ebbs and flows. However, the one constant during this production is how the music proceeds in such a delicate, and largely inauspicious manner. One of the year’s very best! (Feverishly recommended…)



***********

Artist: The Claudia Quintet

Album: I, Claudia

Label: Cuneiform

By Jason Bivins for dusted magazine


A few years ago percussionist/composer John Hollenbeck seemed to spring from nowhere to release a spate of discs for CRI: No Images, Quartet Lucy and The Claudia Quintet, after which his working band is now named. This sophomore release builds on the strengths of its predecessor with the same richly varied instrumental lineup – vibraphonist Matt Moran, accordionist Ted Reichman, tenor/clarinet player Chris Speed, and bassist Drew Gress, in addition to the leader. The music itself still works the furrow between “downtown” improvising, post-rock propulsion, and New Music minimalism (in the Glass/Reich sense). The minimalist influence is no joke, and Hollenbeck has even performed with Meredith Monk. But it certainly doesn’t constrain the relaxed enthusiasm of these intricately woven pieces, in which Hollenbeck is as likely to join the vibraphone on his marimba as he is to kick out the jams.


Quirky polymeters and syncopations abound, and though Hollenbeck likes to bring the funk, there’s plenty to stimulate the ol’ noggin here as well. His composer’s knack for structure generally leads him to set up ear-catching ideas – “accessible,” in other words – but which reveal considerable nuance during performance. Hollenbeck and Gress create an ever-changing rhythmic polymorphousness, shifting accents, playing with phrasing, and gleefully reshaping the general bounce. Speed, Moran, and/or Reichman perform dense counterlines amid a forest of textural and atmospheric effects.


“Opening” epitomizes Hollenbeck’s accessible abnormalities. The album’s second song has a kind of clipped, almost digital effect that recalls electronica (specifically Fennesz during its washed out ambient passages). Sure, solos happen (and I happen to like Chris Speed’s playing here more than on anything else I’ve heard from him; his clarinet work is excellent), but they’re so deeply embedded in the fabric of the compositions that you could forgiven for thinking they’re written out (and hey, Anthony Braxton used to do that).


In general the feel is fairly consonant, although there are the occasional dark tendrils and jabbing harmonies. Only the glacial, Morton Feldman-like silences of the flatlined penultimate track “Misty Hymen” prove an exception to the general compositional method. There are all kinds of details throughout the disc – most generated by the leader, who may blow through a plastic tube or dabble in radio static – that reveal themselves on repeated listens. Taken as a whole, I, Claudia isn’t one of those rock-your-world records. But at the same time, it’s rare to find a band that can actually strike a balance between cerebral challenge and relaxed accessibility.




Jazz Times by Bill Milkowski

On the Claudia Quintet's 2nd latest, I claudia drummer and bandleader JH incorporates James Brown-influenced "Funky Drummer" backbeats and invigorating 2nd-line grooves into the fabric of his not-easily-categorizable compositions. Is it ambient? Is it avant-garde? Is it mimimalist? Is it Downtown? What the hell is it?

Hollenbeck's got such downtown ringers as bassist DG, CS, TR and MM on board, so it's a safe bet that this provocative material will not have precious value above 14th Street in NYC-or virtually anywhere else in America, though they'll no doubt eat it up in Europe. Granted, Hollenbeck is an adventurous new-music composer and conceptualist who follows the courage of his convictions. But jazz fans looking for
anything remotely swinging may want to bypass this heady-post Steve Reich stuff.



Pop Matters
by Robert R. Calder

Acoustonika

A blurb says this group's inspiration is "electronica", which at least affords one lead in trying to say what this quintet sounds like: a drummer, a vibist / percussionist, a clarinetist / saxophonist, a bassist, and an accordionist. They open with the drummer (John Hollenbeck, also the composer) sustaining an almost rock-mechanical beat, with which the vibes make free, while the squeezebox is applied to generate some ethereal sounds. It recurs to these after having its own little time as lead. It's further allowed some unaccustomed dramatic atmospherics before the vibes enter, with a strong jazzman playing bass. The vibes come near to a jazz solo before the accordion completes the ensemble and they jam to a close.

"Opening" is the second track (Duke Ellington had an item called "The Opener" which usually turned up as the final one before the half-time interval). This thing is a play of textures very much on an electronic or Philip Glass model, and one does get the impression that this is really a composer's band, like the Michael Nyman Band in England.

My favourite may be "Arabic", opening with the clarinet, which continues over a sort of Chinese chimes entry. The squeezebox's entry to the accompaniment is a reminder that the bass has been working away all the time. It's a decent tour-de-force for clarinet, and, after some wilder vibes playing, the squeezebox synthesizes synthesizer sounds of an engine sort. The clarinet resumes and produces a nice diminuendo.

"The Cloud of Unknowing" is titled after a very well known German mystical text and has already appeared and been recorded as a composition commissioned for the Bamberg Symphony Chorus. Bamberg is a modest-sized German town unique in having been spared wartime bombing, and in having a major Symphony Orchestra disproportionate with the size of its hometown, to which it was relocated after 1945, having previously been the German orchestra in Prague. This was a sizeable commission! The composer has also won a jazz award.

Here, the accordion enters in very elderly, thready, not quavery little old church organ dress, with the piping sound of one old organ sound made by the clarinetist, and the vibes -- as near as can be managed on vibes -- join in with another ancient organ voices. The bass gets into the act, and there's a sort of inverted Wurlitzer effect, or rather pre-Wurlitzer, ancient organs having begun to try to emulate little orchestras. Something dreamy or hypnotic keeps coming to the fore in Claudia Quartet performances. With the establishment of a distinctive drum rhythm, the vibist moves into something of a jazz solo. The bass is fairly forceful, and presumably these musicians could do a good job as jazz sidemen. The music isn't, however, jazz, or necessarily all that jazz-influenced or jazz-like. It's more a case of extremely well developed jazz techniques being turned to ends of contemporary modern classical music. Perhaps Claudia is really a composer's instrument, an odd ad hoc sort of assembly, who might be previewing music that will subsequently have a different, more conventional orchestration. Regardless, it is a group of players each very much concerned with the expressive and tonal capacities of his specific instrument.

Claudia Quintet
I, Claudia
(Cuneiform)

by Jay Collins
28 May 2004

Drummer/percussionist John Hollenbeck is an ambitious person. Not only does he play with a host of others like the Vanguard Orchestra (Thad Jones & Mel Lewis' band), Meredith Monk, Bob Brookmeyer, Cuong Vu and others, he also leads several of his own groups. This wide variety of opportunities affects his music considerably, making its mark on ensembles like the Claudia Quintet, Quartet Lucy, his duo with vocalist Theo Bleckmann, and other collectives to which he contributes.

As for the Claudia Quintet specifically, a great deal of time has been spent by listeners, writers, etc., trying to accurately define The Claudia Quintet. The task is, however, for the most part, futile. Sure, the group sound and compositions are a unique combination—a dash of jazz, a smidgen of rock, some improv, a touch of non-western sources, or a little chamber. Ultimately, though, all that matters in the end is that this combination simply works. For those unaware of its membership, the group consists of Hollenbeck and bassist Drew Gress, vibraphonist Matt Moran, accordionist Ted Reichman and reedist Chris Speed. The five craftsmen forge a sound that shifts constantly in an unpredictable fashion, perhaps evoking a groove at one moment, soaring into the heights at another, exploring forlorn introspection the next or tackling a swirling sound collage of both prickly and boisterous terrains—sometimes using all of these elements within the context of one composition.

As for their recordings, the group's debut album was a great success and demonstrated the depth of Hollenbeck's vision for the ensemble. I, Claudia builds on a similar approach, offering Hollenbeck's unique hypothesis over the course of eight tracks that consider the range of influences noted above.

The program itself begins with "Just Like Him", as Hollenbeck initiates the groove that drives the composition, a warm venture that features the counterpoint of Speed's mournful clarinet and Reichman's accordion as Gress follows Hollenbeck's lead. Moran's vibes are the drawing point here, as they glisten by providing waves of sound that underpin the ensemble's journey. Along similar lines is "Misty Hymen", which demonstrates that Hollenbeck is more than just a timekeeper, with his impressive drum technique ultimately inspiring Speed's tenor flights and one of Reichman's more riveting moments.

On a different plane, "Opening" offers detached notions of beauty that alternate between spacious scrapings and sound washes juxtaposed against a scattered rhythmic spree driven by Reichman and Gress. A similar detached mood revolves on ". . . can you get through this life with a good heart", with its striking, stark lines that ultimately heat up in the end thanks to a luscious clarinet/vibes melody.

As for the remainder of the tracks, Moran's vibes take the rhythmic lead on "Arabic" with Speed's clarinet soaring over an interactive group improv that cools down at its conclusion. A similar otherworldly feel draws one in on "Adowa (for gra)", with Speed's tenor setting the vamp for this African-influenced track where Moran's vibes, especially in the latter half, are glorious. The group parts with a typically bi-polar exploration on "couch". What begins as a heavy, dubbish vamp drifts into foreboding territory as a vibes/tenor duet signals a drift off into a moody reverie.

Hollenbeck has repeated the success of the Quintet's debut with I, Claudia. Hopefully, this band will continue to work together as an outlet for Hollenbeck's extremely active and creative mind.



The Claudia Quintet
I, Claudia
John Hollenbeck
Media Type: CD
RATING: 6

A gifted drummer with a clear style, a pungent sound, and compositions that draw on influences from funk to the avant-classical of Frank Zappa, on I, Claudia JOHN HOLLENBECK leads The Claudia Quintet through a surreally charged world. Equally delicate and dynamic, the Quintet spends as much time fixated on atonal changes as slipping and sliding over Hollenbeck’s elastically sharp grooves. Hollenbeck is quick-witted throughout, rolling on the unexpected tom or developing a surprise beat that seems equal parts Steve Gadd and some mad dumbek player. If you can wade through the murky bits, you’ll be rewarded with highly original improv.

Ken Micallef
 
 
John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet
On the Boards
Seattle, Washington
October 27, 2003
By Thomas Conrad
 

Late October into early November is the high season of Seattle's annual jazz calendar, because that is when the Earshot Jazz Festival happens. The 2003 version of the festival, the fifteenth, featured more major names than ever before, including Dave Holland and Joshua Redman and Bill Frisell and Ravi Coltrane and Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio. But one of the brightest, freshest, most stimulating evenings at this year's event was provided by a little-known ensemble named for a fan who abandoned them.

Drummer/composer/leader-of-record John Hollenbeck told the story of Claudia, attractive and bubbly, who, between sets at the band's first-ever public appearance, gushed her love for their music, vowed to be there for every remaining night of the gig and disappeared forever. The fact that this band chose Claudia for its namesake and muse speaks to their droll postmodern aesthetic—a sensibility revealed in their opening number, "The Arabic Tune."

In their particular instrumental blend of percussion and string and bellows and wind instruments, the Claudia Quintet sounds like no other. The participants are Hollenbeck on drums (who writes all the band's material), Matt Moran on vibraphone, Drew Gress on bass, Ted Reichman on accordion and Chris Speed on clarinet and tenor saxophone. Some of these players are leaders, and all are strong individual voices. Hence their decision to play team roles demonstrates commitment to this project. The Claudia Quintet is not about theme-and-solos. Constantly evolving thematic shapes and solos are not separate. "The Arabic Tune" began as complex yet airy textures. Intricately notated designs created brief moments when single instruments found themselves alone, but mostly the ensemble rose (to a din) and fell (to the final delicate pointillism) together.

The tone of the evening was established by Hollenbeck's utterly deadpan, slightly twisted song introductions. The second piece, he explained, was written for a swimmer who won a gold medal in the women's 200-meter butterfly at the 2000 Olympic games. "Her name...inspired me," Hollenbeck said. "Misty Hyman" was a harder, louder song, like a pumping, splashing dash to the finish, with Reichman's braying accordion out front. Yet even in this more aggressive tune, the huge swings in dynamic range meant that the music sometimes got quiet. With this band, the subject is always the ensemble and its collective gestures. Tight unisons spun loose into free group interplay, then returned to the score, reconfigured.

The third tune, "Just Like Him," had an opening section that Hollenbeck confessed had been directly stolen from a former girlfriend who was also a composer. ("The relationship ended badly," he shared.) Melodies accrued and accumulated. The eclecticism of this band provokes, moment to moment, attempts at classification like "neobaroque" and "chamber jazz" and "pancultural folk music." But each of these descriptions, once applied, becomes obsolete, because the music moves on. Hollenbeck is an enormously accomplished and versatile percussionist, yet even when he cuts loose, his patterns are elegant and musical. For all the unorthodox harmonies and unexpected structures of his compositions, his music is approachable because of its lyricism and wit. There is lightness, but there is also concentration. In a program of six concise tunes, not a note felt wasted.

The best piece was the closer, and it was a departure in that its emotional sources were serious. "Adowa" was written in memory of Hollenbeck's late grandmother and comes from a West African ceremonial funeral song. Yet even here, the affirmative mood of the concert was sustained, because this motif from Ghana was as celebratory as a New Orleans funeral march. Hollenbeck unleashed complex, tumbling polyrhythms; Chris Speed on tenor rattled fierce riffs; Matt Moran's four mallets rang out in the spaces between.

On the Boards, in Seattle's Lower Queen Anne district, is a right-sized venue for jazz (capacity 550), with superb acoustics. The balanced, clear sound for this concert, the work of Dan Mortenson, was essential to the experience of music so dependent on detail and nuance.

 

August 4, 2003 The NY Times
JAZZ REVIEW | JOHN HOLLENBECK
A Joking Drummer Constructs Innovation
By BEN RATLIFF


"I had a girlfriend who was a composer," John Hollenbeck deadpanned to a small audience at the Jazz Standard on Wednesday, standing in front of his drum kit, which sat at a right angle to the audience. "While we were going out, she wrote a piece called `Just Like Her.' She was jealous of some chick, or something. The relationship didn't end well." He paused, and nobody knew where this was going.

"Later," he continued, "I stole some pitches from her introduction to that piece. She had some B's, some E flats, some G's. I stole all of those, And I made them into my own tune called `Just Like Him,' which is better, and bigger."

Mr. Hollenbeck is one of the best comedians I've heard playing contemporary music. He's also a strong, disciplined drummer with training in jazz and all kinds of nonjazz, modern, folkloric and so forth. (He works both with the Village Vanguard's Monday-night big band and with Meredith Monk.)

His own steady group, the Claudia Quintet, with which he performed at the Jazz Standard on Wednesday, looks like your basic post-jazz setup: bass, drums, saxophone, vibraphone, accordion; at your service for the bridging of swing rhythm, funk, gamelan and West African music. So far so good.

If his music were a little bit dumber ‹ if it didn't contain so many twitchy, hit-and-run compositional ideas, if it used the able saxophonist Chris Speed less as a machine for astringent long tones, if part of its charm weren't Mr. Hollenbeck's heap of little percussion toys, if it let a strong melody have more tyranny over each piece, if it didn't revel so much in tone clashes ‹ it might be able to speak to the cheap seats and achieve semipopularity. (Actually, if the music were a little bit dumber, it would resemble the music of the rock band Tortoise. No disrespect to Tortoise.)

As it is, this is a small, good thing that a few people have grown to like a great deal. For which Mr. Hollenbeck is principally responsible.

Even playing a drum line of his own devising that kept winnowing off and starting up again (unless I'm mistaken, "Couch" was a tone poem about nodding off on one), he played with force and precision.

In "No D" the band started with a long, through-composed section, with Mr. Hollenbeck and everyone else lining out the melody. Finally a groove section for bass and drums opened up, and Ted Reichman, the accordionist, played feverishly around his instrument.

By the end it became a flat-out collective improvising session over a fast groove and stopped abruptly at its peak. Much new multicultural, multigenre music is content to maintain a blasé pose. This band works on building up excitement.

 

The Chicago Tribune April 5, 2002

Claudia Quintet experiments are easy on the ear

By Howard Reich

Innovative jazz does not have to be harsh, angry, loud, shrill or grating; it can be delicate, witty, ethereal and radiantly lyric, as the Claudia Quintet pointed out Wednesday evening in the Chicago Cultural Center.

Led by versatile percussionist John Hollenbeck, the quintet made its Chicago debut with an original and stylistically wide-ranging repertoire that surely shattered some listeners' assumptions about the nature of jazz experimentation. The band reveled in unusual harmony, unorthodox instrumentation and unconventional structure, but the music addressed the ear gently.

There was substance and ingenuity to these scores as well, for the quintet delved into neo-baroque fugal writing, African and Middle Eastern melody and classical chamber music techniques. Yet Hollenbeck and friends elegantly merged these, and other, sources of inspiration. From the opening notes of "The Arabic Tune," it was clear that this band was not going to waste a note. In the gripping introduction to the work, Hollenbeck and Matt Moran shared a single, telegraphic line on vibes, instantly establishing an air of rhythmic tension and melodic expectation.

If this ostinato recalled the minimalism of Philip Glass, Hollenbeck's music quickly transcended the limitations of that idiom, for the score soon blossomed, with exquisite blending of tone from Moran's vibes, Chris Speed's clarinet and Chris Dahlgren's acoustic bass.

The comparatively hard backbeats that Hollenbeck produced on the next work may have abruptly altered the sound of the ensemble, yet Speed's outrageously bent pitches and charismatic, muscular lines required no less. With the rest of the quintet firmly supporting the two, the ensemble once again was producing a unanimity of tone and gesture.

Ultimately, every piece showed a different facet of the group's art. The canonic opening of a medium-tempo work attested to the skill of Hollenbeck's writing, while the sustained lyricism all the players produced in the ballad "Love Song for Kate" represented the kind of unabashed melodicism one does not often encounter from musicians as adventurous as these. And in "Adawa," the band transformed a ceremonial African folkloric tune into a joyously uptempo ensemble piece, complete with rhapsodic accordion solo from Ted Reichman.

The tour de force came with "No D," a masterfully constructed composition that opened with a stunning, Gene Krupa-like solo from Hollenbeck. After this eruption, the rest of the band leaped into the fray, each pursuing a fiercely independent line.

That an ensemble this young could pull off such intricately scored writing said a great deal about the players' commitment to Hollenbeck's ideas. Equally important, the quintet was led by a percussionist who proved as accomplished with a pen as he is with a pair of sticks. And though Hollenbeck played impeccably well, rarely placing himself at the center of the action, the band and the tunes always came first.

 

 CODA MAGAZINE-FALL 2002

John Hollenbeck
No Images
Composers Recordings CD2002

John Hollenbeck
Quartet Lucy
Composers Recordings CD2003

John Hollenbeck
The Claudia Quintet
Composers Recordings CD2004

Drummer John Hollenbeck has a widely varied musical background, and his first three recordings as a leader capture a large part of it, while maintaining some stylistic threads that reassure that he’s more than a musical magpie. Hollenbeck’s credentials include stints with fellow Eastman School of Music grad Maria Schneider’s orchestra, Klezmer Madness, Brazilian pianist Pablo Ziegler and Bob Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra. Brookmeyer is a major compositional influence, and Hollenbeck has won both commissions and awards, including the prestigious Gil Evans Fellowship from the International Association of Jazz Educators. Balancing that academic cred is the fact that he’s also participated in a number of small groups that dominate the hardscrabble scene in New York’s East Village. Is it any wonder that these three projects cover such a broad spectrum of contemporary sound?

No Images is something of a valedictory statement, recorded primarily in 1995, and partially conceived while Hollenbeck was finishing his degree at Eastman. As the title suggests, the recording deals with themes of sight and perception. The title piece, the sole performance from 2001, is based on a stark poem by Waring Cuney about the death of dreams and played by directing a small electric fan at an old autoharp. The sound shimmers and shifts like metallic guitar feedback, with the occasional plucked string breaking the sonic haze like notes on a hammered dulcimer.

The centerpiece of No Images is a 25-minute tour de force built around a sermon by Martin Luther King about the perils of what he terms “The Drum Major Instinct”. The trombone trio of Ray Anderson, David Taylor and Tim Sessions acts as both a chorus, echoing and emphasizing King’s distinctive speech patterns, and as vocal parishioners shouting encouragement and agreement to the preacher. Remarkably, Hollenbeck claims that he was unfamiliar with Max Roach’s Chattahoochie Red, which makes similar use of King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. As if the challenge of improvising around King’s mesmerizing cadences wasn’t enough, Hollenbeck ups the ante by making the musicians work in the dark, so King’s voice becomes the sole focus of their attention. It’s a stirring performance that actually manages to surpass Roach’s for drama and passion.

The three-part chorus is also the basis for the opening “Bluegreenyellow”, which assigns colours to the tenor saxophones of Dave Liebman, Ellery Eskelin and Rick Dimuzio. It marks Liebman’s return to tenor after years of concentration on soprano, and he sounds like he never put the horn down.

Liebman and Eskelin return to duet with Hollenbeck on two rousing sets of six improvisations each, while the remaining piece marks the initial meeting of the formidable trio of Hollenbeck, guitarist Ben Monder and the remarkable vocalist Theo Bleckmann.

No Images is an exceptional debut recording — one that might have been a hard act to follow had Hollenbeck released it six years ago. Followed by the first recordings by his two current working bands — Quartet Lucy, with Bleckmann, saxophonist Dan Willis and bassist Skuli Sverrison, and The Claudia Quintet, with reed player Chris Speed, accordionist Ted Reichman, vibist Matt Moran and bassist Drew Gress — No Images sounds like a promise fulfilled.

The Quartet Lucy recording is as filled with the ethereal voice of Bleckmann almost as much as the singer’s two recordings as leader, with added textures like Willis’ English horn, berimbau and cello. Hollenbeck’s Brazilian influences are much in evidence, and he frequently eschews a drum kit for hand percussion.

The music of Old And New Dreams and Codona are two other touchstones, particularly on “Foreva” with its taut bassline, textured sax and wordless, percussive vocals. Like Don Cherry, Hollenbeck seems drawn to exotic rhythms and singsong phrases, and he weaves it all into a form that defies characterization as jazz, new music or anything else. As on his own recordings, Bleckmann is a fearless singer, willing to stitch together improbable techniques, like the combination of Gregorian chant and throat singing that is the backbone of the closing “The Meaning Of Life”.

Meditative and moving, Quartet Lucy is on the short side at a shade under 50 minutes, but there is much to savour here.

The Claudia Quintet is the most unified sounding of Hollenbeck’s three recordings, filled with music of long tones and small gestures that rewards close listening. Speed, Moran and Reichman are all capable of drawing a variety of sounds from their instruments, and compositions like “Thursday 11:14 p.m. (grey)” find them in deep conversation with hushed tones and muted expression. Gress is the centre of much of the music, often providing the sole melodic element while the other instruments create texture.

As a percussionist-composer, Hollenbeck is relatively unique. With the exception of some of the raucous pieces on No Images, his music glistens more than anything else. Rhythm is frequently subordinate to colour — from the manipulated autoharp on “No Images” to the combined accordion and vibes in Claudia.

Seldom has a young musician given listeners so much to chew on at one time. These three recordings represent an impressive introduction for anyone who hasn’t already encountered Hollenbeck.

James Hale
 

 

Downbeat Magazine October 2002

John Hollenbeck
The Claudia Quintet
Blueshift/CRI 2004

Drummer John Hollenbeck has traveled among jazz, contemporary classical and pan-ethnic folk music with the agility of a seasoned commuter on the New York City subway. Recently, he's worked in composer Meredith Monk's ensemble, clarinetist David Krakauer's klezmer bands, and the Village Vanguard Orchestra. Hollenbecks own discs throughout the past few years show how much he's gained from these multifaceted associations. The Claudia Quintet is the most remarkable of these recordings because it features a spirited working band that becomes an ideal instrument for his compositions.

The other musicians in the quintet reflect Hollenbeck's own versatile journeys. Accordionist Ted Reichman, reedist Chris Speed and vibraphonist Matt Moran also work together in the Balkan-meets-swing Slavic Soul Party. Speed and bassist Drew Gress have also collaborated with such resourceful global jazz explorers as Dave Douglas. While the group undoubtedly draws from these diverse experiences, no influence becomes too obvious. For instance, without playing a generic tango beat, Reichman channels the melodic gravity that the Argentinean idiom has lent his instrument.

Some of Hollenbeck's songs initially echo modern chamber music-"'a-b-s-t-i-n-e-n-c-e" and "Love Song For Kate"-before constantly surprising shifts turn everything around. An extended musical conversation between Speed and Reichman on "Thursday 7:30pm" is redirected through Hollenbeck and Gress' interjections. At other times, the drummer would appear to play a contrasting rhythm from the rest of the group, but its really the ostensible digression that ties them all together. Frequently, the bandleader just makes his presence heard with a few succinct cymbal runs.

Hollenbeck's unassuming leadership offers his band members several ideal opportunities to present their own ideas. Speed goes from the long serene clarinet lines on "Love Song For
Kate" to a honking and squawking tenor on "Burt And Ken." Moran must have also had fun
playing with the vibraphone's pitches on "Thursday 11:14am." At one point, he just lets
the notes linger up in a range that would make a pet dog go apeshit.  -Aaron Cohen