Dan Rosenboom - Coordinates

“The Los Angeles based trumpeter’s new album is downright rocking, reminiscent of bombastic yet tight fusions of jazz and progressive metal…here held together by a much more stylistically fluid vision… Rosenboom’s sonic architectures feel breezy despite their intricate composition, while his rousing sustained tones and rapturous licks lead the way like an unfettered guiding light.” –Antonio Poscic, The Wire

"Rosenboom at his toughest and most colorful, busting the walls to find grandeur in the collapse of modernity and opening cracks into the corners of the soul." –Greg Burk, MetalJazz

“Rosenboom’s return brims with fresh-start urgency, charting a course through environments alive with rhythmic jabs and stabs. Through open platforms—sharply informed by funk, rock, jazz, and metal—he unveils a host of new tricks up his sleeve.”–Felipe Freitas, JazzTrail

For trumpeter-composer-producer Dan Rosenboom, there are no boundaries when it comes to making music. Genre distinctions are meaningless, unusual combinations of instruments are a hallmark, and sources of inspiration are as numerous as the stars. His expansive and explosive new album Coordinates is a multi-faceted exploration of self through the lenses of found numerical patterns, cosmic temporal imagination, orchestrational possibility, and true friendship. It spans the stylistic universe from progressive jazz to metal, world, symphonic, and chamber music sensibilities and features 28 virtuoso musicians from the Los Angeles jazz scene and Hollywood film recording studios. Through an idiosyncratic approach to rhythm and complex unfolding compositions, Rosenboom presents a programmatic concept album that is as sonically rich as it is emotionally riveting.

The title Coordinates reveals the origin of the compositions at the heart of this new album. Throughout his life, Rosenboom has felt an almost mystical connection to the numbers in the world around us. “Coordinates really started as a game,” says Rosenboom, “a challenge for myself to make compelling music out of a series of “found” numbers. These numbers, a series of coordinates that flashed across the screen in a favorite science fiction show, gave me the idea to lay out a grid of time signatures like a game board and to see if I could make those metric relationships groove.” Using these numbers to create the rhythmic frameworks for a series of five pieces, Rosenboom embarked on what would ultimately become a four-year journey in writing and production. Rosenboom continues, “Each piece is an exploration through sound, investigating different moods and aspects of my own persona and imagination - coordinates of being, so to speak. As I wrote and produced this album, I imagined each as a sort of ritual dance from an unknown civilization, somewhere among the stars.”

Coordinates bounces and weaves with a rhythmic language that feels as connected to Balkan dance music as to Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messaien. The orchestration is lush and varied, as Rosenboom brings friends from two worlds together to create a distinct sound, with A-list Hollywood strings, brass and percussion, as well as virtuoso soloists from the vibrant LA jazz scene.