Common Quartet - The Hive (www.commonquartet.com)

Historical article recovered from a Wayback capture dated 2018-02-24.

Like our own Sandy Evans, the saxophonist and leader of this Brooklyn based quartet Seth Trachy, is a student of Indian Classical music. His musical explorations don’t end there though. He has a fascination with the Pygmy music of Cameroon along with Afro-Peruvian music. While those influences are abiding, their imprint on this music is only subtle, for this recording is steeped in the tradition of hard-bop. Common by name but hardly by nature, CQ’s music is far from common. Each of the members (with origins from Chile, Israel, Colorado and North Carolina) contribute seven of the nine original offerings. The standards, Coltrane’s ‘Lazybird’ and Parker’s ‘Big Foot’ are ideal showcases for the saxophone led quartet. The quartet is augmented twice by ex-Paul Motian guitarist Steve Cardenas. It’s a class outing. The band plays as an ensemble, within themselves, never over-cooking but with elegant restraint and the arrangements complement this feel. Command and authority are saved for the up-tempo pieces but one gets the feeling there is always fuel left in the tank. One of the highlights is a piece from the Israeli pianist Nitzan Gavrieli entitled ‘Traffic’. The head is full of punctuation from the band before they lay off and allow Gavrieli the solo space to bring the traffic scene to life with darting, shifting, impatient horn sounds. The band re-enters with forward momentum again and Trachy’s tenor provides further musical onomatopoeia on the traffic theme. The piece peaks with Wyatt’s drum solo and equal doses of punctuation

Frank Presley