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Downbeat, April 2008"Pro Tools Handyman"
Any New York-based jazz musician would draw upon a historical grasp of source material from Thelonious Monk to Mahavishnu orchestra, as well as a working knowledge of the city's venues. But guitarist Jay Azzolina (of suburban Dobbs Ferry) relies on more recent technology to bring these ideas and experiences together for his new disc, Local Dialect (Garagista Music).
"This is the first album I have written with the use of a computer," Azzolina said regarding the stylistic shift from his previous albums, Past Tense and Live at One Station Plaza. Where those were recorded live in a concert environment, Local dialect takes advantage of everything Digidesign Pro Tools' MBOX has to offer.
"My other records were written with pencil and paper," Azzolina said. "This time I just started messing around, playing guitar into the computer, finding some drum loops that I liked and writing to them, then replacing the loops with a live drummer. Because of the immediacy of being able to play an idea and hear it back in the computer and decide where to go from there, the music came together quickly."
Along with John Patitucci( with whom Azzolina regularly tours), saxophonist Tim Ries, trumpeter Scott Wendholt, trombonist Mike Davis, organist Larry Goldings and drummer Greg Hutchinson, Azzolina has produced a cubist-inflected computer assisted masterwork. Similar to earlier recordings by John Scofield (Still Warm) and Miles Davis (Decoy), but firmly assaulting the futuristic fronts currently being explored by saxophonist Steve Lehman (Demian As Posthuman), Azzolina's Local Dialect maneuvers swerving arrangements that were born of a computer but realized with human hands.
Azzolina's Pro Tools experience is similar to improvising on the computer.
"You come up with a motif and then that takes off and goes wherever it is going to go," Azzolina said.It is not always that easy to write that way with pencil and paper- you write it down and after a few minutes maybe the thought of what could come next has already disappeared. If you are just playing and improvising on the computer it appears instantaneously."
Local Dialect's first three tracks, "Friends Of Friends," "Three Ladies" and Between Thoughts," are rhythmically agitated and melodically urban sounding. Azzolina"s clipped guitar lines and Ries' organic horn arrangements are given a caustic, often kinetic thrashing by Hutchinson's robo hip-hop patterns. The individual bars sound as if they were programmed or at least cut and pasted, within Pro Tools' rigid grid, even though Azzolina refrained from this technique.
"I didn't cut and paste too much," Azzolina said. "I would play something, go until I felt like stopping and then listen back. I might have a 32 bar section then come back later and tweak that or go from there. It was done in fragments. When you are downstairs in your basement all alone in the middle of the night, the different things you come up with are unusual."
Local Dialect also includes a Brazilian-flavored acoustic guitar track, a couple of organ trio swingers and one full-bore drum-and-bass dream from beyond. For Azzolina, whose wife, Jill died in 2005 and for whom much of Local Dialect is dedicated, music remains the perfect release.
"It was a great relief for me to compose some music in memory of Jill," Azzolina said. "She was a musician as well, and we had such common ground. I was thinking of her a lot and hearing her advice, just getting a feeling of where she thought some of the music should go. It was cathartic in that way."
-- Ken Micallef
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