Curtis Nowosad - Curtis Nowosad (2019)

Canadian drummer and composer Curtis Novosad is focused and unsmiling on the strict cover of his new album. The debut album is often called the proper name, for Novosad this album is already the third one. Curtis recorded his first two albums in his native Winnipeg, Manitoba, and his second album, Dialectics, was nominated for Canada’s highest musical award, the Juno Award in the category Best Solo Jazz Album. So, he only indicated his name on the cover for other reasons. These Curtis wanted to emphasize that the new project is his personal message to the public, and beyond the purely musical scope.

However, first things first. Let's start with these very musical frames. They are quite simple: jazz (here and postbop, and elements of funk in individual tracks) plus blues. Novosad, now living in New York, has assembled a very worthy team of partners to record an album. Excellent bosses: Duane Eubanks on trumpet, Braxton Cook on alto saxophone and trombonist Corey Walls on four tracks, two keyboards: permanent partner Jonathan Thomas and Mark Carey as a guest and producer of the project, two vocalists of different styles - Michael Mayo, decorated two of them track syllabic singing and perfectly performing blues Brianna Thomas, finally, the famous bassist Luke Sellik.

Novosad included three covers in the album: Gilbert Scott-Heron's Home is Where Hatd Is, Skip James’s Hard Time Killing Floor Blues and Nina Simon’s See Line Woman, a poet and human rights activist, bluesman and an outstanding singer — as you see The choice is curious. Novosad wrote the remaining five compositions himself, four of which he dedicated to specific people, civil rights activists, social activists and human rights activists from the past and the present. So, the system of views of this musician is quite obvious. And in purely musical terms, he defended it in a nominal album very convincingly: a good, diverse in style, beautiful in music, an album made by real masters of his craft.