Search - Eric Hofbauer Quintet :: Prehistoric Jazz Volume 3 - Three Places in New England

It's gratifying to see young jazz bandleaders of our day reinvent the music of Shostakovich, Webern, Ligeti, Machaut and others. For Boston-based guitarist Eric Hofbauer, who in 2014 confronted monumental works by Stravinsky and Messiaen on Prehistoric Jazz, Vols. 1 & 2, the goal was not a melding of genres or a salute to "serious" music in general, but rather a puzzling over matters of timbre and instrumentation, improvisational pathways and harmonic implications specific to these composers and not others. The orchestrations were rigorous yet everywhere was the spark of the unexpected. Hofbauer's take on the encounter of European modernism with the America of blues and jazz follows in the best tradition of Joplin, James P. Johnson and all that came after. That holds true once again for Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 3, devoted to Charles Ives' Three Places in New England, a masterpiece of bracing modernism that the Connecticut sage completed in 1914 and revised in 1929. Ives' sound world - deeply mysterious, irreverent, dissonant in the extreme - is kindred in spirit to the "prehistoric jazz" that Leonard Bernstein once spoke about in Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, and that Hofbauer extrapolated on Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 2 to include Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Moreover, Ives' appropriation of plantation songs, military marches and other vernacular sources is itself jazz-like. And Three Places, inspired as it is by Revolutionary and Civil War monuments as well as natural scenes in and around Ives' native Connecticut, amounts to a meditation on America's past and future - something about which jazz has quite a lot to say. The Quintet features Hofbauer - guitar, arrangement, Jerry Sabatini - trumpet, Todd Brunel - clarinet and bass clarinet, Junko Fujiwara - cello, Curt Newton - drums