Badlands

Description

Badlands features original compositions by the members of the trio · plus 1 standard for good measure!

1. Surrender (Alan Pasqua)
2. Daddy, What Is God’s Last Name? (Alan Pasqua)
3. Push/Pull (Alan Pasqua)
4. On The Lake (Peter Erskine)
5. My Most Beautiful, Nos. 1,2, & 3 (Alan Pasqua)
6. Boogie Shuttle Stop (Dave Carpenter)
7. Badlands (Alan Pasqua)
8. Summerâs Waltz (Dave Carpenter)
9. Meanwhile (Peter Erskine)
10. You and the Night and the Music (Dietz/Schwartz)

Piano: Alan Pasqua
Bass: Dave Carpenter
Drums: Peter Erskine

Recorded August 7 & 8, 2001, at Puck productions, Santa Monica, California
Engineered by Brian Risner, Mixed & Mastered by Rich Breen

The recording of Badlands (by Peter Erskine)

For the follow-up album to “Live at Rocco,” the Trio wanted to capture the growth of the band … a growth that has resulted in freer expression, more interplay between us than ever before, and a higher level of abstract thinking. And all of this manifested by a new minimalism! … or, perhaps, a relaxation … or better yet, an appreciation for the beauty to be found in small things.

We decided to record this album at home, in my home studio. I’ve enjoyed a great-sounding rehearsal room and comfortable workspace in my backyard studio ever since my family and I moved to Santa Monica (back in 1987); with the addition of some digital recording equipment, we had the means to document the trio. Luckily, engineer Brian Risner (who I worked with back in the Weather Report days) was living across the street … Alan Pasqua had recently moved to Santa Monica, and Dave Carpenter drove from the “valley” to the west side of Los Angeles to join us … it all seemed a very convenient and natural way to make our next album!

We originally set aside and planned one night to “get sounds,” and 5 evenings to record in a relaxed manner … well, during the first night of getting sounds, we wound up recording for about 3 hours, and on the official “first” night of the recording, we tracked for another 2 and a half hours … and we realized that we had just recorded one of the “best” albums of our lives!

Jazz recordings are like snapshots, or family photos … a moment of time, captured for eternity. (Sometimes a smile might seem a bit crooked, or one person’s eyes might be closed at the moment the shutter is snapped, etc.) We really like this “picture” of the band! We hope our listeners will, too. The album sounds great, and the tunes plus improvisations are all gems in my book. This album marked a new path for us.

A couple of more words about the Trio: we feel that the band enjoys a rather unique distinction in that all three players are also composers. As composers, that means we not only write most of the material we play … but we also play all of the material in a “compositional” way (as opposed to playing merely as “players”). To me, this means that the construction of the music always has an architectural logic, a sort of mathematical purity AND a passionate sense of discovery, both private and communal.