Matt Haimovitz - Cello Jazz (2020)

Matt Haimovitz’s multi-faceted cello knocks down musical boundaries while scaling emotions from darkness to joy in "Cello Jazz", a wide-ranging playlist featuring some of Haimovitz’s hottest collaborators. Classics like Billy Strayhorn’s haunting Blood Count, George Gershwin’s languid Liza, and Miles Davis’s bebop Half Nelson are reborn in inventive arrangements by modern master David Sanford, who contributes his own big band cello concerto, Scherzo grosso, and the intense Seventh Avenue Kaddish, a solo tour-de-force. Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango and DJ Olive’s dreamy Trans resonate alongside the “brilliantly inventive” (The New York Times AKOKA, with stellar clarinetist David Krakauer, and the jubilant musical playground of Aaron Jay Kernis’s First Club Date. Peak bliss is unlocked with two John McLaughlin tracks from the Grammy-nominated "Meeting of the Spirits", with Haimovitz’s maverick band of cello warriors, Uccello.