Quinsin Nachoff - Patterns from Nature

Every new release from Quinsin Nachoff is a headline event, a radical combining and recombining of sonic and conceptual innovations, ever-evolving textures, powerful melodies and rhythms, that always open up new vistas for exploration while clearly marking the way back to what has come before. The album Patterns from Nature is an unashamedly ambitious showcase for his remarkable abilities as a composer and orchestrator, working within the space where the heartfelt collaborative improvisation of jazz meets the adventurous rigor of contemporary music and the depth and complexity of conceptual art.

As composer, Nachoff created the closely written, intricately detailed scores for a pair of large-ensemble pieces. As bandleader, he oversaw the realization of those scores by a hand-picked team of remarkable genre-crossing musicians, including pianist Matt Mitchell, percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, bassist Carlo De Rosa, clarinetist François Houle, trombonist Ryan Keberle, and the internationally renowned Molinari String Quartet, supported by a large chamber ensemble conducted by JC Sanford. As interdisciplinary collaborator, he worked with physicist Dr. Stephen Morris, whose research into emergent patterns in nature informed the project’s structural concepts, and four filmmakers, Tina de Groot, Lee Hutzulak, Gita Blak, and Udo Prinsen, originally conceived alongside them for a multimedia version of the work, resulting in the titular Patterns from Nature suite of four contrasting movements that engage the listener at every level.

For the second work, the intricately conceived three-movement concerto Winding Tessellations, Nachoff takes center stage as tenor saxophone soloist, exploring the interplay of structured composition, improvisational freedom, and dynamic orchestration.

Patterns from Nature presents four movements of music that are as rich in detail as the natural processes that inform their development. ‘Branches’ interprets the growth patterns of trees, with Matt Mitchell’s piano unfurling across ever-changing orchestral textures. ‘Flow’ uses the wide-ranging dynamics of Satoshi Takeishi’s unique percussion set-up combined with the extraordinary textural range of the Molinari String Quartet to capture snapshots of the complexity of fluid flow. On ‘Cracks’ a three-way conversation between the orchestral score and the improvisations of Carlo De Rosa’s bass and François Houle’s clarinet, create an endless series of bifurcating possibilities, while the concluding ‘Ripples’ develops into a thrilling dialogue of tension and release between Nachoff’s saxophone and Ryan Keberle’s trombone over expanding waves of sound that finally taper off into silence, mimicking the icicles from which the inspiration derives.

The range of sonorities is astounding, and the mixing of players from the cream of the New York jazz scene with virtuosi from the contemporary classical world allows a blend of intricately scored music and free improvisation. ‘Winding Tessellations’ explores an equally dramatic territory. Nachoff’s virtuosic saxophone playing moves across the changing sonic landscape over three extended movements, from adventurous energy through meditative gravitas into a driving groove-based release before accelerating toward an intense finale. The work concludes dramatically, with the saxophone soaring into a stratospheric shriek as the basses and celli descend into detuned obscurity, a sonic landscape pulled asunder.

Nachoff says “I like to bring together people and practices that don’t usually intersect, physicists, filmmakers, classical and jazz musicians, to find common ground while allowing the differences to spark new directions. In a time when so much gets flattened into sameness, we can instead create exciting, adventurous work that invites curiosity and leaves space for mystery.”

These are unapologetically complex works, drawing inspiration from Stravinsky, Xenakis and Ligeti as much as from Gil Evans, Duke Ellington, Kenny Wheeler, Wayne Shorter and Henry Threadgill. Yet the music also speaks clearly and directly to the listener, responding to and reproducing some of the hidden complexities of nature, in a way that reflects the fact that all these natural things can also be grasped intuitively, to fill the soul with wonder.