The Jazz Gallery: Adam O’Farrill: ELEPHANT

The Jazz Gallery
1158 Broadway, 5th Fl.
New York, NY 10001

Sets at 7:30pm and 9:30pm

ELEPHANT
Adam O’Farrill- trumpet and electronics
Yvonne Rogers- piano and synthesizer
Walter Stinson- bass
Russell Holzman- drums

Composer and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill presents his quartet, ELEPHANT, across two evenings. ELEPHANT features Yvonne Rogers, Walter Stinson, and Russell Holzman. The group will be preparing to record its first album.

“There’s little disagreement that Adam O’Farrill is among the leading trumpeters in jazz- and perhaps the music’s next major improviser.”- The New York Times

Composer and trumpet player Adam O’Farrill’s music is as radiant and free-flowing in its melody, as it is geometric and off-kilter in its rhythm. As a bandleader, O’Farrill has released the critically-acclaimed albums Stranger Days, El Maquech, and Visions of Your Other, collections of music inspired by everyone from Miles Davis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Thom Yorke to Alice Munro, Rene Magritte, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Further shaping O’Farrill’s work as a composer and improviser have been his collaborations with a wide range of artists including Mary Halvorson, Hiromi, Anna Webber, Mulatu Astatke, Tyshawn Sorey, Son Lux, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Samora Pinderhughes, Kaoru Watanabe, Photay, and Stimmerman.

A native Brooklynite, Adam was born into a deep musical lineage. His grandfather, Chico O’Farrill, was a legendary composer and arranger, considered one of the first major artists to combine jazz and classical music with the rhythms of his native Cuba. Adam’s father, Arturo O’Farrill, is a Grammy-winning pianist and composer, and the founder of the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, a foundation dedicated to the advancement and expansion of Latin-American music. His mother, Alison Deane, is a classical pianist and educator who taught at The City College of New York for over 30 years, and his brother, Zack O’Farrill, is a drummer and percussionist who plays in Adam’s quartet, Stranger Days.

O’Farrill’s newest album, HUESO, is the next chapter in the Stranger Days story, and in addition to Zack, features Xavier Del Castillo on tenor sax and Walter Stinson on bass. Produced by Spencer Murphy,. the music on HUESO is an attempt to channel the pastoral serenity of rural western Maine, the location of Morning Glory Farm, where the band participated in a residency in the weeks leading up to their recording session. The album primarily features compositions by Adam, among them Gesturing Towards The West, a piece whose structure is linspired by the cadences of jisei, a type of death poem from Japan. It also contains two interpretations of Thom Yorke’s Truth Ray- one in the form of a solo trumpet performance, and the other featuring the whole quartet