JAMES FALZONE
Genres: Avant-Garde Jazz, World Fusion, Third Stream • United States

James Falzone’s music is heavily improvised but hardly accidental: each of his projects is reasoned, built from a defined challenge or concept, rarely music purely for its own sake. His most jazz-forward project, KLANG, arose somewhat by chance in early 2006, but offered him an opportunity to reinterpret the language of pre-1960 clarinet jazzmen. The group’s first studio release, Tea Music, explored impressions left by Jimmy Giuffre (Falzone says his influence here was the 1950s groups, but to my ear his phrasings fall more in line with Giuffre’s ‘60s innovations on Free Fall), and the follow-up, Other Doors, brought new life to the works and spirit of Benny Goodman. KLANG’s latest release, 2012’s Brooklyn Lines. . .Chicago Spaces, however, abandons a clear starting point. Its music and title suggest an abstract geometry, Falzone and Jason Adasiewicz’s lines at times parallel but more often bent in an elaborate harmonic dance, not touching but read more...