New Tricks Jazz

Hey New Tricks CD is great – but don’t take my word for it, check out this review:

It’s impossible to do justice to all of the fine new music issued in 2009. So I’ve listed ten of the discs that had the greatest impact on me. Each one includes the name of the drummer who was essential in making the music special.

Mike Lee is a saxophone master who has worked in the New York City area for almost two decades. His latest CD, a co-billing with trumpeter Ted Chubb, is an angular and daring affair. It’s piano-less, modeled after the original Ornette Coleman Quartet; this is post-bop, not bop

New Tricks Mike Lee / Ted Chubb | Independent (2009) By Glenn Astarita New Jersey resident, veteran educator, group leader and session ace Mike Lee pulls some new tricks out of an old bag on this 2009 quartet date with co-leader/trumpeter Ted Chubb. In the liners, Lee mentions that this aggregation found its origins via [...]

Over the past few years, the northern New Jersey-based band New Tricks has painstakingly developed a distinctive sound during weekly sessions in the basement studio of saxophonist Mike Lee. It is almost bad form to single out contributions of the tightly knit quartet’s members, which include Lee, trumpeter Ted Chubb, bassist Kellen Harrison and drummer Shawn Baltazor. An excellent, self-titled compact disc recorded in 2007 and released several weeks ago on New Tricks Records only approximates the high energy and single-minded intensity they generated throughout an opening set at Cecil’s Jazz Club. “We are New Tricks,” Lee declared after the first number, as if to underscore the group’s “one for all” ethos.

Although these musicians are all soloists in their own right, in an ensemble setting “New Tricks” plays as if they are one instrument and concomitantly, their strong suit is their intuitive interaction and resultant tight sound. “New Tricks” is well on its way to becoming one of America’s premier jazz ensembles and hopefully will perform as a unit long enough to make an impact on the jazz world.

Quick reviews of recent events Submit your own review or commentary to Events@CoolCleveland.com New Tricks Quartet @ Nighttown 7/16 Mike Lee and Ted Chubb, two mainstays of the New York jazz scene who have roots in Northern Ohio, played Nighttown last Thursday with their four-piece band The New Tricks Quartet. They performed two solid sets of [...]