Thollem With Hafez Modirzadeh

***"Here is a sonic palette of eight re-tuned pitches for piano and saxophone, explored in an attempt to expand harmonic empathy. The aesthetic that arises from this interrelating of the foreign with familiar reveals an intrinsic logic, or inherent beauty, that lifts hegemonic remnants of one temperament from another. And there, within where the Tao splits, every fundamental tone illuminates a person, resonating facets of every ancestral partial, sounding humanity from its source. Thollem has radiated this humanity ever since our first meeting at an improvisation class back in the early 90’s – the joy exuded on that day, from that piano, opened the sky for me. Liken this to our flat view from earth of a constellation-filled sky, where Thollem’s astral purview encompasses the depth of these distances, traveling near-to-distant between such destined points, his sound being as the line seen between the stars. To hear his sound, then, is to gaze up into creation and smile in awe, feeling a rotating canvas of ideas in ecstatic order, holding us together in generous surrender to a facet-pouring spirit of friendship. These Facets and Improvisations are from the very first sessions with this particular re-tuning, in San Francisco, capturing the compositions in their most essential form, while the Improvisations that close the album are from the very last session in Brooklyn. Altogether, here is a befitting resolution to a decades-long idea, delivered with/by a comrade whose life-arc in music completes my own."—Hafez Modirzadeh