The Brooklyn Sax Quartet, co-founded by tenorist David Bindman and baritonist Fred Ho, and joined by Sam Furnace and Chris Jonas, is a boldly colorful, radical saxophone quartet, performing original works and arrangements which span the breadth of new music and harmonically rooted blues-based traditions. The music is funky, tough, raw, intelligent, cross-cultural, beautiful and passionate, a celebration of tradition, improvisation and innovation.
Many of the ensemble's compositions are expansive narrative suites which bring out the very different voices of the improvising members. It is precisely these differences that create tension and balance; yet the ensemble members are able to become one, to stop on a dime, to find danceable grooves which metamorphose into entire movements. The sonic variety and extended techniques of the saxophone, including slap-tonguing and multiphonics, add to the colorfulness, while rich harmonies and layers of cross-rhythms cause the quartet to sound at times like an entire big band, and at others like a group of drummers. The rhythmic complexities both written into compositions and discovered spontaneously are the undercurrent and fabric for improvisations which go off in many directions, with each performance being a surprising and new creation. Brooklyn, with its teeming urban crossroads, is the musical, physical and spiritual home for the quartet's performer-composers.
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