Stillpoint Chris Gestrin

• 1 Stillpoint 05:01
• 2 Never Summer Range 08:06
• 3 Outpost 04:36
• 4 Complex One/City 07:33
• 5 This Past Tuesday 02:16
• 6 Words Along a Wire 08:41
• 7 Movement and Perspective 08:13
• 8 Cliffs and Clouds 04:34
• 9 My Painted Dream Bird 05:58
• 10 Interview With a Child 02:08
• 11 2.23 Restart 09:32
• 12 Shades of Night Descending 04:37
• Total Runtime 01:11:15

Info for Stillpoint

Chris Gestrin is a great new talent, a Vancouver-based pianist, keyboardist and composer who might occasionally put you in mind of Bill Evans or Keith Jarrett, if either of those masters were young today and equally at home with the acoustic and the electronic, jazz and ambient. His handpicked, versatile quintet, featuring trumpeter Brad Turner (of the Canadian band Metalwood) and masterful drummer Dylan van der Schyff, creates rich images in sound. From a tender solo piano improvisation to swirling group inventions, a 'narrative' of almost cinematic sweep unfolds. Gestrin's compositions range across jazz, experimental music, new age and world music for their ideas, but this is not 'fusion' in any ordinary sense, there is too much originality and panache for that. The sessions were recorded in 96kHz sound and mixed in analogue; the stereo version is a thing of beauty.

The first aspect that you notice about pianist/composer Chris Gestrin on the album Stillpoint is that he likes to play with the aesthetics of sound and that, for him, music is about craftsmanship. His influences are wide-ranging, from the likes of Chick Corea and Miles Davis to Dmitri Shostakovich, but the applications of their influences to his music are understated, morphed behind the conceptualization of avant-garde jazz. There’s such a feeling of unquiet about the album that one could very easily disengage from it before realizing its depth. The music explores space, tranquility, time, and distance using traditional jazz instrumentation and sampled sounds. To some, this will be just another one of those pretentious modern music albums, a series of random notes thrown together and mixed in a pot, without realizing that there are subtle structural elements connecting the framework. At only 29, Gestrin’s music already possesses a sense of maturity, exemplified by his ability to flesh out original musical ideas by employing a slew of compositional devices with an obvious thoughtfulness. The exhilarating part is that the music is not written out in its entirety. There is a sense of rawness to the music, the kind that is only associated with free improvisational jazz. (Alison Wong)

Chris Gestrin, Piano, synthesizer, sampler, electronics
Brad Turner, Trumpet, flugelhorn, electronics
Jon Bentley, Tenor & soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, electronics
Andre Lachance, Acoustic Bass
Dylan van der Schyff, Drums, percussion, electronics
Joseph 'Pepe' Danza, Percussion
Deanna Newton, Voice

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