Rolldown includes seven studio tracks and an eight minute video, takes its name from Adasiewicz's four year-old working band of the same name featuring Josh Berman, Aram Shelton, Jason Roebke and Frank Rosaly.
"Composing pieces for Rolldown started with free improvisation on the piano," explains Adasiewicz, who wrote all the music during a year in Madison, Wisconsin in which he supported his wife's academic pursuits and re-evaluated his life while working on a vegetable farm. "The melodies are usually comprised of more than one voice and the tunes do not follow a chord progression, but were constructed using conventional ABA song form. Harmony is created spontaneously during the group's improvisation, and the rhythm, while deeply rooted in the jazz tradition, at times pulls away from any suggestion of pulse."
"He emphasizes his terrific originals in Rolldown," wrote the Chicago Reader's Peter Margasak, adding, many songs on Rolldown "recall the brilliantly oblique postbop material Bobby Hutcherson recorded for Blue Note in the late 60s, but others are based on gently rippling, coloristic passages. Adasiewicz lays down spiky, sweet-and-sour harmonies behind the solos, and his own improvisations are jagged tangles that make unexpected turns and recapitulations."
Adasiewicz is a member of more than 20 working bands, including the Guillermo Gregorio Trio, Fred Lonberg-Holm's Valentine Trio + 1, Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra, the Nicole Mitchell Quartet and Ken Vandermark's Double Quartet. His debut as a leader on 482 Music follows a long association with the label that includes recordings with Aram Shelton's Arrive, Harris Eisenstadt and Mike Reed's Loose Assembly. He also appears on two tracks from the sampler that launched the label's Document Chicago series in 2003.
"Adasiewicz's compositions and arrangements immediately bring Blue Note-era Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy to mind, but the sourcing, while obvious, doesn’t feel slavish or hackneyed. The instrumentation... also engenders instant comparison, but again it's hardly evidence of plagiarism. Adasiewicz and his colleagues absorb the basic tenets put forth on those Sixties vinyl classics and place a 21st century personal spin on them... Vibraphonists seeking to extend the pioneering work accomplished by doyens like Hutcherson and Dickerson are relatively few. Adasiewicz is certainly countable among that modest number and this debut will hopefully mean the first of many more albums to follow." — Derek Taylor, Bagatellen |
