Zeena Parkins - Bobby Previte: Terminals (2014)

Drummer, composer, bandleader and improviser Bobby Previte is known for his voluminous contributions to New York’s legendary downtown experimental music scene – an immensely fertile period in the 1980s that saw the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass breaking new ground with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, Bang on a Can and many more.

Now with nearly four decades under his belt as a creative force behind the drumkit, Previte has assembled a dream team of musicians from the jazz, indie rock and classical worlds to create TERMINALS, a luminous project consisting of five concertos for percussion ensemble and soloists, each inspired by the schematic-like terminal maps that Previte has noticed in airports around the world. The eternally adventurous So Percussion accompanies throughout, as Nels Cline (Wilco), John Medeski (Medeski Martin & Wood), Zeena Parkins and Greg Osby take turns in the forefront to deliver an electrifying part-composed, part-improvised workout spanning two vinyl pieces.

In the liner notes to the LP, pressed in a deluxe double-gatefold package, Previte breaks down the influences that inspired the project. “Terminals is a collision between, and a celebration of, two worlds. In clichéd terms: the precise, unflappable, ‘classical’ percussion ensemble meets the wild, uncontrollable, ‘jazz’ master improviser in the forum best suited to such a meeting, the concerto – a schizophrenic word whose etymology is much debated but in Italian means to ‘join together,’ while in Latin means to ‘contend.’ These two worlds happily co-exist in my mind. This is the country in which I live.”