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MP3 Rob Howard - Zeitgeber
6 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Progressive Rock, JAZZ: Acid Jazz
Details:
From both the compositional pen and amplified guitar of Paragon founder Rob Howard comes Zeitgeber, Rob''s first album recorded under his own name. Fans of Paragon''s music will love this album, as it has all the hard rock bite and jazz inflections that his music with Paragon has always had, yet this album finds the composer/performer able to display material that is deeply personal and at times even introspective (yet introspection for Rob still means peeling the enamel off your teeth with powerful Zeppelin-esque riffs!)
Kicking off the album is "Who Mourns For Adonis", and the allusion to mythology is well placed as this track clocks in at an epic twenty minutes in length! Rob states:
"What I wanted to do was a sort of jazz-rock ''rondo'' with a melody that kept coming back, with episodes that seperated the main sections. It also gave me a chance to have some totally different moods in the same performance. The first bit is orchestral, whereas the second part was directly inspired by the Miles Davis Album ''A Tribute to Jack Johnson''. It was very difficult to record because my friends and I believe in recording stuff live in the studio, no overdubbing, and a work of this length makes that difficult as performing a few takes can take several hours!"
The friends that Rob mentions are many of his Paragon band-mates, which include Matt Baumann on tenor sax. Baumann displays much of the searching, exploratory style he uses in Paragon live shows, utilizing a large pallete of creative sounds. In particular, his Joe Henderson influenced octave and unison note riffs in ''Adonis'' help give the composition a sense of deep groove.
Speaking of deep groove, Jason Gahler returns to handle the bass duties on this outing. Although fans of Paragon are already aware of his vocabulary of outrageously hip basslines, he gets a chance to show his skills in group interaction. On "The Big Hello", Jason engages Rob''s eastern influenced soloing and effectively creates a sense of counterpoint. Jason has played with Rob for a long time, since they were both freshman in college, and it''s clear that Jason knows all of Rob''s licks!
Rob also brought to other gifted young musicians on board as well, outside of the Paragon group. Elijah Vazquez, a brilliant drummer who had played with some of the hippest cats in the NW Ohio jazz scene sits in the drummer''s chair for tracks 2-6. Listen for his adroit use of the snare drum, which sometimes acts like rocket fuel for the soloists and compositions. Sometimes its a well timed single snare drum crackle, others it''s the light rat-a-tat-tat of the stick bouncing off the drum. Matt Skitzki played keys on the album, and Rob certainly salutes him for putting up with allowing his keyboard sounds to be drastically altered from the original state! He also plays a melodic solo on "In Theory", with hummable ideas that one remembers long after the next track plays from the CD player. Mr. Skitzki is also a trained classical pianist, and his touch is very evident on Rob''s Erik Satie homage, "Memories of Michelle" and even on the final track, "The Big Goodbye".
Seann Flynn was a late addition to the album, but a very welcome one. Rob explains:
"I had a very different intention for what I wanted this album to be at first. It was to be called ''The Big Goodbye'' and was to have tracks with vocals stuff like that... but I didn''t like how some things turned out, so I scrapped the vocal tracks and kept the instrumental numbers. I was light on material, then, so I had to record something else. This was long after the original session, and at this time Seann Flynn became the drummer for Paragon, and we brought him in to play. He also was greatly helpful in that he mastered the album as well".
Seann Flynn one of the hardest working drummers around, and all those rock n'' roll gigs come to play in his interpretation of "Adonis"- listen to those toms go BOOM and how he digs in under those powerchords! Yet he also displays a light touch on the cymbals during the tune''s calmer moments.
Overall, the album can be said to have two modes: Concise and crisply performed "songs without words" such as "In Theory", "Memories of Michelle", and "Song For Mary", and exploratory numbers, compositions that are explorations both compositionally and in group interaction and improvisation, such as "Who Mourns For Adonis", and "The Big Hello/Goobye". Finally, one last quote from Rob:
"What I have always wanted to do was create music with ''levels''. This stuff, I hope, rocks!! And people who want that energy and power will probably find it here. Yet, I''m a trained jazz musician, and I have a great desire to bring that to bear, and I hope that added layer of craft will give the music a certain staying power. But more fundamentally, it always comes down to this: what would I want to listen to myself if I were buying a CD? So I just go out there and, God willing, try to make that music".
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