Sound It Out: Darius Jones Quartet

The Darius Jones Quartet – with the saxophonist-leader joined by pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Ches Smith – Plays the Greenwich House Music School, December 20. 

“Equally earthy and avant-garde….intellectually stimulating though anything but academic, Darius Jones can keen, weep, caress – and cut, too. The appealing unruliness to his music co-exists with authority.” — JazzTimes 

The Sound It Out series presents the Darius Jones Quartet at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 2012, at the Greenwich House Music School in New York’s West Village. The saxophonist-leader and his all-star band – with pianist Matt Mitchell, double-bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Ches Smith – will play music from his latest Aum Fidelity album, Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise), along with some surprises. Jones, a New Yorker originally from Virginia, has made a name for himself with an alto sax sound that blends the holy-rolling preacher blues of Cannonball Adderley with the folk-flecked avant-garde wailing of Albert Ayler. JazzTimes described Jones as musician with “a head full of ideas and a heart full of talent,” while Jazzwise said: “Jones’ playing and composing may have some of the mercurial energy associated with the avant-garde, but the communicative immediacy of African-American folk traditions stands like a bedrock in his work.”