STRATOSTROPHIC!

The new Empty Cage Quartet record just dropped. Stratostrophic is our fourth major release and an exciting one considering this is coming out on Clean Feed Records, a label from Portugal that's been releasing some of the most exciting new jazz over the last six years. We're pleased and honored to be joining a roster that includes some real heroes of the music: Anthony Braxton, Gerry Hemingway, Rob Brown, Ken Vandermark, Herb Robertson, Joe Morris, Charles Gayle, Mark Dresser, Elliot Sharp and many others.

Here's the official release:

The Empty Cage Quartet consists of four musicians — saxophonist Jason Mears, trumpeter Kris Tiner, percussionist Paul Kikuchi and bassist Ivan Johnson — who have been praised consistently by critics as one of the most powerful and substantial new jazz groups to emerge from the American West Coast. Recorded during a hot summer in Los Angeles, Stratostrophic is a fiery set of original compositions that ranges from shuffle swing to free jazz blowouts, minimalist percussion loops to complex modernist gestures, funky stomps, odd-meter marches, robotic grooves, heavy rock, and nearly everything in between. The music is vigorous and methodic yet tender and reflective, dead-serious yet open to the occasional wry, sideways irony. As Wadada Leo Smith expresses in his liner notes, these young musicians are certainly on a path "to reach the whole truth of a creative music".

The music is available now in corporeal (i.e. CD) form at the Clean Feed site, and it should be available shortly as a download on iTunes and at the Amazon MP3 store.

On the tour front, the group was recently awarded funding from Chamber Music America's French-American Jazz Exchange program to travel to Montpellier, France for a series of performances, workshops and a studio recording this summer. More on that as it develops...