Jeff Albert

On November 21, I spent a day in the studio recording with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Joshua Abrams. Zack Smith took some pictures.

There are some more behind the scenes photos here.

I’ll have news about a release time frame for the CD that will result from these sessions soon (I hope).

Enrico Sartori (alto clarinet), Domenico Caliri (guitar), Silvia Bolognesi (bass), Simone Padovani (percussion), Marcello Benetti (drums) & Jeff Albert (trombone)

This was recorded at UDIN&JAZZ 2011 XXI EDIZIONE on
Monday, June 20, 2011 in Cervignano del Friuli, Italy

I recently discovered that I made the Rising Star Trombone list in the 2011 Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll. It is an honor to be in such good company, and feels good to know that someone has noticed. Thank you.

http://www.jonathanfreilich.com/frontpage/2011/5/27/complete-interview-with-jeff-albert-trombonist-and-curator-o.html

Click the link above to hear an interview of me by Jonathan Freilich. Jonathan has been doing podcast interviews with New Orleans musicians, and he has a great knack for getting us to say things we didn’t know we knew.

The Advocate (Baton Rouge’s main newspaper) wrote a nice review of our concert on April 4, 2011.

With a little imagination, you could look at the young men and women playing on the stage Monday night at the Manship Theater in Baton Rouge and see any other workaday musicians performing for an audience.

Well, maybe more than a little imagination.

Instead of violins and trumpets, the nine musicians — seven LSU grad students and two LSU professors — were typing on laptop computers, moving objects in front of webcams, manipulating joysticks and waving around wiimote controllers. They even created an instrument called a “gua” — played on an iPad.

Read the entire article here: http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/Music-from-things–you-touch-every-day.html

The following pictures were taken on Tuesday, March 22, when the Jeff Albert Quintet performed live in studio for the WWOZ fund drive.

The horns: me, Aurora Nealand, and Ray Moore (Our regular member, guitarist Chris Alford) couldn’t be there, so Aurora cheerfully and ably helped us out)

Doug Garrison on drums

Jesse Morrow on bass

One more of yours truly.

Thanks to WWOZ’s flickr for the pics. Please support your public radio station(s).

The following photos of our performance in Tampere (Finand) were taken by Alejandro Lorenzo. Alejandro is a fine photographer, and he was also on the staff of the festival and helped keep us all running smoothly.

l to r: Napoleon Maddox, jeff Albert, Jeb Bishop, Hamid Drake (not pictured are Joshua Abrams and Hervé Sambe).

Hamid Drake and Bindu: Reggaeology at the London Jazz Festival:

“Having worked together since 2006 when they hooked up to form Lucky 7s, it was no surprise that the two trombones spent much of the evening hanging on each others coat tails, phrasing as one, veering between seat of the pants counterpoint and raucous support for each other’s solos. New Orleans resident Albert boasted the fuller tone, and brought with him some of his natal cities’ second line sensibilities, while Bishop tended more to the abstract and dissonant. Both took fine features: Bishop’s muted ‘bone on his own ‘Fred’s Gift’ was particularly noteworthy, while Albert tore it up with the plunger mute on ‘Mother Kali’s Children No Cry.’”

These videos from our show in August in Sant’Anna Arresi, Sardegna, Italy just came to my attention.

The September 2010 offBeat has a nice article by Zachary Young on the New Orleans “out” scene.

Unchained Melodies: Improvised Music in New Orleans :: offBeat :: Louisiana and New Orleans Online Music Resource:

“People tend to have a certain character in mind when they think of the avant-garde musician: the conceited eccentric, blowing silly noises out of his horn in an ostentatious attempt to distance himself—it’s a predominantly male community—from the mainstream musical world that shuns him. Whatever the picture, it certainly doesn’t look much like trombonist Jeff Albert.

The music of Albert’s own quartet lives between the worlds of the composed and free-improvised. But he can often be found playing a variety of more straight-ahead styles, with groups like George Porter, Jr.’s Runnin’ Pardners or the John Mahoney Big Band. He thinks of the idioms not as opposed to one another, but rather as different points in a continuum. ‘In my conceptualization, it’s not that it’s all that different,’ he says. ‘It’s just that in my band, it’s my version of how I organize this music.’”

Jeff Albert Quintet at Open Ears Music Series. Photo by Caitlyn Ridenour.