Battle Trance - Green of Winter (2022)

On August 26, 2022, “the unusual quartet Battle Trance, comprised of four wildly talented tenor saxophonists” (NPR), releases Green of Winter, the followup to 2016’s Blade of Love, one of the “20 Best Avant Albums of the year” (Rolling Stone), a record featuring “three adventurously dense movements … that maintain a focused sense of restraint and melody throughout” (Pitchfork).

On Green of Winter, Battle Trance—a quartet that lives and works and plays in the seams between contemporary classical and avant-garde jazz—delves deeper into their signature musical language, working intimately with the connection between the human body and the human breath, a connection that composer Travis Laplante hones as a Qigong practitioner; by using the technique of circular breathing to create hypnotic waves of sound and layered saxophone multiphonics, or chords, Battle Trance weaves intricate, ancient textures that shed fresh light on the saxophone as an ensemble instrument.

Green of Winter, the third album in a New Amsterdam Records trilogy featuring both Blade of Love and 2014’s Palace of Wind, is a work of beauty and mystery, a musical harvest cultivated from the deep friendship between Battle Trance’s four members, Travis Laplante, Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner—“America’s favorite tenor saxophone quartet” (Kenny G*)—as they celebrate their tenth anniversary as an ensemble.