Trumpeter Michael Sarian Releases Portishead Cover "Glory Box" in Advance of New Album ESQUINA on Greenleaf Records

Trumpeter Michael Sarian is a veteran of a myriad of iconic jazz stages, from the Kennedy Center to the Blue Note, to the Montreux Jazz Festival. He is an established composer and improviser who has several releases on 577Records, recordings with Olec Mün on piano and coffee records, and with his own quartet on ears&eyes and Shifting Paradigm Records. He performs on his own custom “SARIAN” mouthpieces, made in France by Atelier Donat. And he is in-demand and indefatigable as a sideman, playing on stadium stages with household name pop groups.

On his latest, Esquina, the Toronto-born, Buenos Aires-raised, and NYC-based musician leads his quartet through more than fifty-five minutes of riveting, corner-turning jazz exploration that will delight fans of Miles Davis’ electric period and Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet alike.

What’s particularly remarkable –– apart from the remarkable music itself –– is that Sarian is working here with the same musicians he has worked with on his previous three releases. Those records were more or less works of chamber jazz, mostly acoustic, brimming with beautiful and clear melodies, and drawing comparisons to artists like ECM veteran Kenny Wheeler. Esquina, however, is an intentional and daringly sharp turn into pulsating jazz fusion, marked by wild, Jon Hassell-esque processed trumpet, synthesizers and electric organs and pianos, and galloping rhythms that would not be out of place on Agharta or On the Corner.

Born of Sarian’s need to challenge himself and his collaborators, the music that comprises Esquina was recorded with little to no rehearsals and follows graphic scores which were formed out of drawings and sketches that Sarian made during downtime while on a four-month stadium tour as a pop band sideman. In no small sense, then, Esquina can be thought of as a kind of shadow work. Whether deliberately, intuitively, or somewhere in between, Sarian responded to these months of mainstream pop music and a rigid tour schedule with experimentation, adventure, and play. And to no small extent, he responded to the stability he had himself built through playing with Nathan Ellman-Bell, Marty Kenney, and Santiago Leibson. Sarian could have of course simply assembled a different band, designed specifically to deliver the kind of aesthetic that he had in mind. But in coaxing a reinvention out of this established crew, he imbues Esquina with a sense of profound but playful challenge, and builds on the near-telepathy that these players share.

As an artist, Michael Sarian is anything but stationary. He’s on the move, spiritedly drawing and following his own path. And Esquina is a corner turned.

Of the track, Sarian states: "I grew up hearing Portishead's Glory Box – I was a kid when it was released, and then it became a part of pop culture fabric, appearing all over TV and movies, and it always stuck with me. The mix of soulful vocals and trip-hop beats felt unique. While working on Esquina, I realized the track could fit really well within the more improvised, loosely structured experimental sound I was developing. The emotional vibe and atmospheric quality of the original seemed like something I could reinterpret in a fresh way. It felt like a perfect opportunity to rework a song that had been with me for so long, while taking it in a new direction."