BEST JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM
Jazz Selections: Music From and Inspired By Soul, Jon Batiste
Absence, Terence Blanchard Featuring The E Collective and The Turtle Island Quartet
Skyline, Ron Carter, Jack Dejohnette & Gonzalo Rubalcaba **WINNER**
Akoustic Band Live, Chick Corea, John Patitucci & Dave Weckl
Side-eye Nyc (V1.IV), Pat Metheny
Pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba's latest album, Skyline, marks his eight release on his co-founded label, 5Passion Records. Skyline is the first release from a planned trilogy of piano trio albums for 5Passion.
Rubalcaba — raised and educated in Havana, where he played professionally as both a drummer and a pianist before emigrating first to the Dominican Republic in 1991 and then to Miami in 1996 — tells celebrated jazz journalist Ted Panken in Skyline’s liner notes that early gigs with the giants of the artform like bassist Ron Carter and drummer Jack DeJohnette turned out to be his, “real school, [his] portal to a different relationship with American musicians and American music.” So ..check complete article
]]>Skyline Trio stems from Rubalcaba’s long-standing ambition to reunite with the mentors of his youth. It’s his eighth album on 5 Passion, the imprint label that he launched with the 2010 solo piano album Fé, and the first of a trilogy of trio encounters intended for release in September 2021.
“I’m lucky that both Ron and Jack said yes,” Rubalcaba says. “They are very different personalities, which I mention because coming into the studio with them – or touring or playing a live concert – is not only a matter of playing together but living together humanly in the moment. Ron has a humor that is unique to him; I think of him almost as an English guy, even in the way he dresses. Jack is a storyteller; he loves to tell stories about everything – not only music. All these factors – the elegance, the eloquence, the smarts, their solutions to certain harmonic and rhythmic moments – you can hear in the way we play together. We had a four-hour rehearsal at Power Station studio NY, and then recorded the music in two days.”
Ted Panken
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