Joe Morris Quartet - A Cloud of Black Birds

In Autumn of 1998, AUM Fidelity very proudly presented this brand new body of work from peerless guitarist-improviser-composer Joe Morris. This impeccable quartet had been honing the material & their collective voice on stage before hitting the studio to record. It is one of our absolute favorites in Morris' now radically extensive & diverse catalog of works, and is without question a crowning achievement in this vernacular, or any genre of music. Sinuous & seductive.

Following are press responses following its original release..

"A guitarist who computes the full matrix of influences from jazz to rock, but mostly jazz, uncovers labyrinths of riffs in the higher frets that have a mesmerizing ingenuity reminiscent of Ornette at full bore, enigmatic and compulsively listenable." –Gary Giddins, Village Voice

"Listening to the Joe Morris Quartet is astonishing – because his departure from syntactic thinking is challenging and yet so, well, pretty. The music seems alien because it so clearly belongs in the natural world from which Western man has taken great pains to separate himself. Yet Morris communicates. If anything, he shows how we retain intuitive links to the natural world."
–Jeff Bagato, The Washington Post