Absorb by Joel Futterman

This solo piano music by Joel Futterman called ABSORB is like no other music that was, or will be, created. Futterman has reached deep into his soul and captured a prophetic flow of sound full of rhythmic essences and beautiful contrasts, guiding listeners to the heart's deeper places. These places are rarely touched upon in schools of musical thought. This music goes beyond thought; it is about feelings and compassion - these sounds, songs, and poems. Swing, in the truest sense, is fueled by the movement of blues and cosmic delight. "Absorb" connects to the sacred history of the unknown - the joy of music and the experience of living another day. Joel touches the piano keys like there is no tomorrow, both robust and sensitive. In the meantime, through the corner of my eye, I can see Charlie Parker digging this music all the way. Each stanza of the music is about building mountains made from modal hymns for the rest of the world to follow. Play Joel Futterman, dance, sing, shout at the top of your lungs, and sketch, reaching the next level.

Continue, stop, and remember: the message is to love all human beings every day. This is the information in Joel Futterman's music: the more we listen, the more apparent it all becomes. The closer we come to the fundamental concept of love.

--William Parker





"Never has the title of a Joel Futterman album been chosen to better effect. Futterman's pianism has reached a point of what might best be called multidirectional absorption, layers of simultaneous and symbiotic expansion and distillation in which a lifetime of spontaneous creation imbues each gestural complex. Audition and reauditon illuminates the heart and mind behind each micro and macrocosmic event.

The first part, half an hour of peak-and-trough narrative over which springs of drone flow in abundance, can also be heard as gestural point and counterpoint. The wonderfully subtle articulations of a single sonority, at 14:03, bespeaks the way timbre and tonal relationships nest and nurture each other, speaking to the decades of absorptive contemplation in practice.

The first three pieces begin with the same descending interval, itself then absorbed into the tides and turns of textural intricacy and tonal ambiguities typical of everything in Futterman's vast and rich catalog. Viewing the entire canvas reveals a landscaped diminution, a process in progress toward final piece's miniaturization without any lessening of motivic intrigue.

The entire album's processes inhabit a more sharply delineated space in which interregistral meteor showers, staggered middle-register repetitions, exquisitely etched basslines and, finally, chord and stride in heroic balladry prefigure bluesy ecstasies.

Nothing, though, prepares for the final interval, a sustained dyad in which the music, all music, seems poised, encapsulated, embraced."

--Marc Medwin

Squid Note Records is a division of the online record store and music distribution service, Squidco LLC. Our obsession is with improvised, experimental and contemporary forms of music and sound.

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