Listen: Pascal Le Boeuf – "Home In Strange Places"
"This album is a collection of original music meant to highlight the conversational voices of the individuals in the band," explains the pianist Pascal Le Boeuf on the subject of his forthcoming release, Pascal's Triangle (Nineteen-Eight). The album features Pascal's trio, which includes the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Justin Brown (who led his own group at The Gallery last weekend). "We trust each other's choices and share an orientation towards self-expression through group improvisation. Every time we sit down to make music, we are exploring the depths of what is possible."Though the final product is an acoustic jazz trio album, many of the compositions originally included electronic instruments, and programmed sequences of computerized rhythms. "Though this vision was successful, and I plan to release these [versions] at a later date, I enjoyed the spontaneity of the more acoustic songs," Pascal says. "When I took the electronics away, the compositions all had an intimate conversational feeling." This is, in some sense, the aesthetic Pascal was after all along: "a conversation in which the composition is a subject or the frame work of a story, and Linda, Justin and I expand upon it as a collective."Pascal was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, and developed his talents alongside his twin brother, the reedist Remy Le Boeuf. The connections strengthened and grew deeper and more serious over time, as turns towards composing and improvising led Pascal and Remy to realize that they both wanted to keep playing music for the rest of their lives. The brothers moved to New York in 2004, and have continued to perform and record together to this day. Since arriving, Pascal has received degrees from Manhattan School of Music and performed with some boundary-pushing elders and peers, including Chris Potter, Marcus Gilmore, John Benitez, Marcus Strickland, Ambrose Akinmusire, Clarence Penn, and others.Akinmusire, Penn, and Strickland appear alongside Pascal and Remy on House Without A Door, which The New York Times describes as "an impressively self-assured new album, which reaches for the gleaming cosmopolitanism of our present era." The twins' latest recording is In Praise of Shadows (Nineteen-Eight), which you can stream in its' entirety here. Downbeat praises the "brothers in musical crime and creative invention with chops and a flexible pocketful of ideas about how jazz could go in the 2010s," and JazzTimes compliments the way in which the brothers, "deftly blend elements of electronica with touches of indie rock and sophisticated jazz writing."We look forward to welcoming Pascal, Linda, and Justin to our new stage (1160 Broadway, 5th floor) on Thursday for a pre-release performance in celebration of the album, which drops officially on May 28th. In anticipation of the show, we're offering an exclusive stream of the first track from Pascal's Triangle, "Home In Strange Places." Listen below:[audio https://www.jazzspeaks.org/wp-