Mouthpiece album review - Cormac Larkin The Sunday Tribune 25 Oct 2009
Dylan Rynhart/Fuzzy Logic Ensemble
Mouthpiece
Composer and keyboardist Dylan Rynhart has been leading his nine-piece ensemble for the last seven years and it just keeps getting better. Mouthpiece is their second recording and marks a considerable advance on their first, New Hat. The leader's writing has become more assertive, with stronger melodies and more space for the soloists, and he has drawn into the ensemble several players, including guitarist Joe O'Callaghan and saxophonist Brian Wynne. Produced by German conductor Florian Ross and featuring top UK trumpeter Tom Arthurs, Fuzzy Logic now rate among the most daring and original musical ensembles working in Ireland today.
Mouthpiece album review - Kevin Stevens The Journal of Music 1 Oct 2009
BIG MOUTH
Ideas you don't often encounter in a big band
FUZZY LOGIC ENSEMBLE
Mouthpiece
FUZZY LOGIC ENSEMBLE is Ireland's largest and longest-running big band - or "contemporary improvising ensemble" as composer and founder Dylan Rynhart prefers to describe the group. This distinction is important. "Big band" can connote music of the swing era or a conventional reeds-and-brass, riffs-and-solos approach that is far from Fuzzy Logic's sound range and musical vocabulary. Yet the band is very much part of a jazz tradition that goes back to Duke Ellington, using extended forms and varied instrumentation to create a broad range of sonorities and textures. Like Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, Rynhart writes music with a compelling balance of highly arranged orchestral passages and carefully chosen solos. And like Brookmeyer's protégé Maria Schneider, he searches out non-traditional rhythmic and ethnic influences to create twenty-first-century music that is both sharply executed and expressively open-ended.
Mouthpiece is the ensemble's second recording, and its flowing lines and tight sound are evidence of the band's longevity and its success in articulating its founder's vision. Much credit is due to Rynhart, who continues to drive the group with hard work and good-natured advocacy. Credit must also go to Florian Ross, conductor and musical director of the pieces on this album, and of course to the musicians, whose collective dedication is matched by inspired execution and inventive soloing.
The album's centrepiece is the title track, which takes as its point of departure a fragment of a speech recording of Rynhart's mother, Justine, in which she speaks of a painting done by her stepmother. Her words carries themes of family, creativity and legacy into the piece, but they also allow Rynhart, who transcribed his mother's voice musically and arranged the tune's melodies around its rhythms, to explore the dimension the spoken word brings to music - hardly a new concept, but one you don't often encounter in the big-band tradition.
The shifting, multi-textured density of "Mouthpiece" is very satisfying and characterises the album as a whole, especially "Flip Shuffle", with its lilting melody and intriguing rhythms; the Zappaesque "There is so much to Smile about", featuring Joe O'Callaghan's fluid guitar and Sue Rynhart's airy vocals; and the quirky "Dusty Time", which surprises at every turn. Rynhart sticks mostly to Fender Rhodes on this outing, and it would have been good to hear more of his swirling Hammond organ, which enlivens tenor saxophonist Brian Wynne's piece "Order Later". Nick Roth's composition "pliARS", with Roth's ferocious alto sax weaving through the tune's Middle Eastern rhythms, is also a highlight. The musicianship is brilliant throughout, particularly Roth and guest soloist Tom Arthurs on trumpet.
FUZZY LOGIC ENSEMBLE has been a prominent feature of the local Dublin scene over six years, so it is appropriate that the album has been so handsomely packaged and presented by Fuzzy Music and the Improvised Music Company, who have both done so much to document this very productive period in Irish jazz.
Mouthpiece album review - Ray Comiskey The Irish Times 4 Sep 2009
DYLAN RYNHART: FUZZY LOGIC ENSEMBLE
Mouthpiece
On this second CD by composer/ keyboardist Dylan Rynhart's Fuzzy Logic, his writing, though clearly by the same hand (six pieces are his, two by ensemble members Brian Wynne and Nick Roth), is an obvious advance on his fine debut. The voicings are richer and more varied and there's a particularly deft sense of proportion to the development of texture and counterpoint. Replacing cello, French horn and clarinet with tenor, soprano and electric bass has enhanced the ensemble, while solo options are increased not only by Joe O'Callaghan (guitar) and the brilliant Tom Arthurs (guesting on trumpet and flugelhorn), but also by Wynne (tenor) and Cathal Roche (soprano). And the complex ensembles, thanks to conductor Florian Ross, are among the best executed by an Irish jazz ensemble. Standout examples of a uniquely conceived project include Flip Shuffle, Dusty Time and The Difference between Light and Hard.
RAY COMISKEY
The Sunday Tribune - Cormac Larkin 16 Aug 2009
Offbeat
FUZZYLOGICENSEMBLE
Putting together a jazz band is a quixotic affair at the best of times. But putting a large ensemble together, and keeping it together for the best part of a decade, is a feat of the most sublime optimism. Eternal optimist Dylan Rynhart founded his ten-piece FuzzyLogicEnsemble in 2002 to perform his own compositions and since then, the ensemble has toured extensively and in 2005, released its first album, New Hat, to great acclaim.
If there was a concern, it was that with such a young group, there were no mature soloists who could do justice to the scores Rynhart was putting in front of them. The addition of saxophonist Brian Wynne - himself a formidable composer but also a player of great depth - and the recent arrival of virtuoso guitarist Joe O'Callaghan have added considerably to Rynhart's palette.
For the group's second album, Mouthpiece, which will be launched at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday night, the composer has also drafted in some special guests, including the highly-regarded German pianist and composer Florian Ross as producer, and up and coming British trumpeter Tom Arthurs to add some bite to the horn section.
www.fuzzylogicensemble.com.
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