Bob Gluck Featuring Andrew Sterman, Tropelets

Some music seems born out of a vast personal experience. Pianist-composer-electronic magician Bob Gluck's Tropelets (Ictus 173) is one such example, and a very good one at that. He recently lost his father, Stan, and dedicates this album to his loving memory. This album was recorded before that but in a way it has a summing-up quality, an appreciation of and reverence for the Judaic background both shared.

The music on this album is comprised out of melodic elements drawn from Judaic cantillation, the tradition of liturgical recitation that goes back very many centuries. Bob on piano and various integrated electronic/electro-acoustic sounds shares improvisational inspirations with Andrew Sterman on soprano sax. All springs out of cantorial melody.

This sort of project generally stands or falls on what is done with the sources. Bob and Andrew do something very contemporary and lucid in a modern avant jazz zone. To say that it works is an understatement. It manages to convey cantoral melodic essences while taking those generative templates far afield into a music of today.

It is music that creates synergies between old and new, traditional and modern, the historical and the immediate. The synergies are very moving and satisfying to hear. This one achieves something wholly other by driving a creative wedge between opposite poles and creating a new space within that fulcrum edge-point.

Gluck and Sterman create some phenomenal music!