Richard Sussman Evolution Suite

Pianist, arranger and composer Richard Sussman has been passionately exploring the inner and outer frontiers of contemporary musical expression for the past five decades, and I first met Richard when he brought his adventuresome and hard-swinging hard bop Quintet into my San Francisco jazz club Keystone Korner in the late 1970s. Since that unsung era of exciting modern jazz exploration and development in the 1970s and early 1980s, Sussman has continued to be an active and integral member of a whole generation of musical innovators -- almost all of whom are quite amazingly still working very productively on the cutting edge of contemporary jazz music -- along with Jerry Bergonzi, John Abercrombie, Richie Beirach, Michael Fomanek, Jeff Williams, Dave Liebman, John Scofield, Randy Brecker, Joe Lovano, Tom Harrell, Gene Perla, Larry Schneider, and so many others. I've always sought to create my own artistic universe out of the many kinds of music that I love and have been deeply influenced by -- from Horace Silver, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, to Bela Bartok, Olivier Messaien, and Arnold Schoenberg, to James Brown, Ray Charles, and Earth, Wind and Fire, Richard explained to me in a recent conversation. By combining jazz improvisation and many diverse rhythms and instrumental textures from throughout the world with contemporary classical music, I feel we can more truly reflect and more strongly connect with a wider cross-section of the multi-cultural society in which we live. Richard Sussman's ground-breaking The Evolution Suite for Jazz Quintet, String Quartet, and Electronics is the culmination of over a decade of development, and this five-movement composition was funded by a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Grant, and premiered and recorded on December 20, 2015, at Symphony Space in New York City. Todd Barkan, Associate Producer