Wayne Horvitz

When Wayne Horvitz’s first Songlines album American Bandstand came out in February 2000 it was his first piano record as a leader in 13 years. Its success with critics and the public led to touring and a second set of tunes for this version of “Zony Mash” (which became known as Zony Mash Acoustic). The music can be as intense as Zony Mash electric, but more often it expresses the reflective side of Wayne’s temperament: bittersweet, melodically distinctive chamber jazz, an evocative combination of swing, bop, blues, west coast cool, and the occasional edge of free jazz, with echoes of French impressionism and other classical piano music and popular music of the 50s and 60s. Recorded in January 2001, this was Songlines’ first multichannel SACD.

New York born, Seattle-based Wayne Horvitz is one of the more prolific and celebrated composers and keyboardists of the last forty years. He has been a frequent collaborator of John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Butch Morris, Bobby Previte, and his wife Robin Holcomb, among many other practitioners of the new music that has roots in jazz and improvisation but is limited to neither. He has also composed for film, TV, dance and theater.