Mayman-Pritsker Project, 2015 Annual Report

The Mayman-Pritsker Project is a collaborative effort between Gene Pritsker, an important contemporary multi-stylistic compositional force in the music of today, and Yaacov Mayman, a saxophonist of ability and a writer-arranger in his own right.

2015 Annual Report (Composers Concordance), gives us an album of the wild and wooly possibilities that are actualized when the borders between genres are ignored willfully and creatively. So Gene on guitar, melodica and as DJ joins forces with Yaacov's saxophone, with Yevgeny Lebedev on keyboards and Aleksandra (Mogilevich) Mayman on drums, plus guest Borislav Strulev on cello.

Gene's DJing gives us a wide arc of sampling possibilities and the band gives us some fine improvisational tenor sax while Gene plays some subtle guitar and the rock-hip-hop contemporary arrangements of all sorts of things carry the day.

Mayman and Pritsker give us some worthy compositional ideas but then the eccentric arrangements of Bach, Gershwin, Tizol, and Hancock open things up further. Tabla against the opening Prelude to "The Well-Tempered Clavier"? Why not!

It's all good fun and ingenious at that. There is an occasional smooth jazz gloss that maybe is a bit jarring but all the more unexpected.

It is music you might expect from Gene Pritsker, meaning that it is absolutely unexpected. It is a hoot!