Brad Shepik Quartet

In the first half of 2009, at the time his programmatic world-jazz Human Activity Suite was gaining raves, New York guitarist Brad Shepik was putting together an entirely new group to play pieces he’d recently composed.

Having led and co-led several trios during the previous 18 years, he finally settled on a quartet with vibes player Tom Beckham, whom he’d been performing with for 5 years in George Schuller’s Circle Wide quintet: “Tom’s got a unique touch on the vibes and an amazing sense of harmony, he really gets inside of whatever he’s playing and pulls things out of the harmony that I don’t expect.”

From almost the beginning of the process Brad was working with a young drummer who was getting noticed a lot, Mark Guiliana: “He has an amazing touch on the drums and cymbals as well as an incredible groove and totally unique way of placing things.” The quartet jelled with the addition of bassist Jorge Roeder: “Jorge is from Lima, Peru and just has an amazing rhythmic feel and sense of harmony that really enhances this music.”

Indeed, the finesse and élan of the playing in the back-and-forth of the moment, for example in the way the group flexes around the grooves, or the spacious, quiet, joyful way Brad and Tom spur on each others’ solos, makes the music really sing.

This quartet embodies a fresh approach to the jazz mainstream – one that can incorporate for example west African (“Transfer”), rock/funk (“Mambo Terni”) and folk/minimalist feels (“Across the Way” and “Marburg”). And if the music may sometimes remind listeners of new developments from the late 60s or 70s (e.g. Gary Burton’s groundbreaking fusion quartet with Larry Coryell), Brad doesn’t draw hard distinctions between mainstream and freer jazz along stylistic lines: “The experience of listening to a recording of Django or Tal Farlow or Lonnie Johnson or Joe Pass or Cal Collins can hit me just as hard as listening to the great artists that are playing today. Also I think I hear a lot of the history of the earlier greats in the all of the really good players of today.”

What the quartet format offers is “room to stretch out as a soloist….I like the freedom of playing with another chordal instrument [as well as bass]. The music I’ve been writing lately is less specialized than things I composed for groups like BABKAS and Pachora. We’re improvising just as freely in this group but with different materials and maybe in a more subtle way….The freedom to interpret the music spontaneously keeps things fresh for me as a player and composer.”