THE MARK DRESSER TRIO
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Denman Maroney, hyperpiano - Mark Dresser, bass - Matthias Ziegler, electro acoustic flutes
Trio picture by Reuben Radding
About the Musicians
The Mark Dresser Trio’s premier performance was in 1999 at the Knitting Factory in New York City. Since then, they have recorded and toured nationally and internationally at distinguished festivals and venues including The National Gallery of Art, LACMA, the Stone, and many others. The trio features sonic explorers Denman Maroney on hyperpiano, the Swiss electro-acoustic flutist Matthias Zieger, and Mark Dresser on electro-acoustic double bass. Shared affinities for sonic exploration, polyrhythm, harmony and melodic invention informs their improvisation, composition and interpretation of a music that shares affinities with jazz and contemporary classical music but is unique unto itself. The trio recorded Aquifer (Cryptogramophone, 2002). Residing between France, Switzerland and California.
This will be their first performance and recording together since the pandemic.
“Some musicians show a natural penchant for looking deep under the hood. They rummage around the tradition and the literal apparatus of their instrument to find musical inspiration. Mark Dresser is part of that world: his trio album, Aquifer is a formidable banquet of sonic data, tied together with a unique artistic logic. Dresser freely crosses over from jazz to new music and from improvisational to written music. Dresser continues to carefully and intelligently split the difference between various genres of music.”
– Josef Woodard, Jazz Times
“[Mark Dresser is] a bassist who is one of the great instrumental forces in recent American jazz outside the mainstream.”
– The New York Times
“Dresser uses the bow like Picasso used the brush: to refract and recast certain realities and to create completely new ones.”
– Robert Bush, San Diego Reader
"Virtuoso Ziegler's vision of a solo polyphonic music makes this the ultimate flute record.... He makes the flute sound like the wind, or like any number of instruments, including cello, double bass and horn. A beguiling and extraordinary achievement."
- The Wire
“There are few minds as agile and inquiring as that of pianist, composer and educator Denman Maroney. Over nearly 40 years, he has managed to rethink the piano vocabulary, creating a readily identifiable language on the instrument. He calls his contribution “hyperpiano”, a method of playing inside the piano that is characterized by a dizzying and diverse pallet of sonorities that make the instrument into an orchestra. He has also developed an equally unique compositional language involving combined pulses, employing the phrase “temporal harmony” to describe it. Yet, there is a directness, at times almost a simplicity, in his music. With his playing and in his compositions, Maroney combines musical genres and transforms sounds we think we understand, adding depth and color, often at great speed, while never sacrificing clarity."
- Mark Medwin, All about Jazz