Tigran Hamasyan Trio // Charles Lloyd

Tigran Hamasyan works to find a meeting place between jazz and the distinctive modes of the music of his native Armenia, where he was born in Gyumri, the country’s second largest city, in 1987. At three years old he began trying to play the piano, at six he was attending music school, and at nine he began to study jazz. He was 10 when his family moved to Yerevan, the capital, and 16 when they relocated to California. His first album was released in 2006; his sixth, “Mockroot”, was recorded with his trio and appeared this year. It features his voice as well as his piano on compositions strongly influenced by his feelings for his homeland, and in several cases directly inspired by the work of the Armenian poet Petros Duryan.
www.tigranhamasyan.com

As a summation of everything Charles Lloyd has worked towards in a career going back to his apprenticeship in blues bands in Memphis, where he was born in 1938, “Wild Man Dance” is, the words of “Jazz Times”, “the composition of his life”. First performed at the Jazztopad Festival in Wroclaw in 2013, it has been greeted with unanimous astonishment and delight by audiences in Europe and the United States as a work of great aesthetic beauty and spiritual resonance. For this hour-long piece in six movements, Lloyd takes a conventional quartet line-up and adds two musicians: a Greek player of the lyra (a small bowed fiddle) and a Hungarian exponent of the cimbalom (a hammered dulcimer). “I’m a sound-seeker,” Lloyd says, “and I think people are hungry for something deep and true and special.”
www.charleslloyd.com