Aaron Bennett, tenor saxophone
John Finkbeiner, guitar
Mark Clifford, vibraphone
Tim Perkis, electronics
Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass
Jordan Glenn, drums

This set of music is what happened when I let Italo Calvino and his Cosmicomics stories fully inhabit my mind for a year. I found his fictional universe an ideal place to hang out in as a composer—it’s a space of boundless imagination, infinite generative possibility, fierce intellectual curiosity, and just the right amount of irreverence and weirdness to rescue it from being cute. He reminds me over and over again of the wonder and playfulness of the creative act, and I tried to transfer some of the intoxicating energy of his prose to my music, and to how the musicians in the band interact. Calvino’s stories about the cosmos, the origins of the universe, and the evolution of humans and creatures geek out about Big Ideas, but they also freak out when those Smaller Human Impulses—our neuroses, desires, silliness, pettiness—get the better of us. His words are delicious and his imagery sets all your neurons firing... more
credits
released February 1, 2020