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GYAN RILEY - GUITAR
TIMB HARRIS - VIOLIN/VIOLA
Violinist/violist and trumpet player Timb Harris' professional musical interests span from
contemporary chamber music to grinding death metal. He records and tours internationally with
the bands Estradasphere and Secret Chiefs 3. As a performer and recording artist, he has worked throughout the United States and internationally with many of today's leading 'new music' artists (William Winant, Joan Jeanrenaud (Kronos Quartet], Carla Khilstedt, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Eyvind Kang). His performances can be found in the catalogues of Tzadik Records, Mimicry Records, the End Records, Warner Bros., and more.
SCOTT AMENDOLA - DRUMS/HAND PERCUSSION
Scott Amendola first gained widespread notice a decade ago for his work in eight-string guitar ace Charlie Hunter's trio. Although he continues to work as a sideman, accompanying artists such as Madeleine Peyroux and Kelly Joe Phelps, in recent years he has stepped forward as the leader of several compelling bands that showcase his supremely supple trap work, notably his own Scott Amendola Band. He has toured and recorded with a vast array of stellar artists, such as Bill Frisell, Pat Martino, Paul McCandless, Jacky Terrasson, and John Zorn.
Journalist Rob Casey (The JMI) on the Gyan Riley Trio
True, Gyan Riley's music often has commentators scrambling for an atlas in an effort to contextualize it; countries are name checked like items on a shopping list: India, Spain, France, Ghana, the Balkans, but it takes a preternatural musical sense to find the cohesion from within such a disparate mix that Riley and his group so readily achieve. His music may articulate the wide approach of a dedicated record collector but his compositions are assiduous in their fusion of styles. There is no gratuitous stylistic shoehorning going on here, every note is stamped with Riley's own personal vision. This is evidenced by the fact that the music is not overburdened by the considerable weight of Indian, West African, Western Classical and American traditions that have informed it. The extraordinary breadth of influences serves simply as testament to the open mind and inquiring ear of Riley and his fellow musicians. Uncompromising traditions have been digested and filtered through a very personal musical sensibility that should still any facile attempts to summarize the music with allusions to geography, tradition or for that matter gastronomy.
Yes Gyan Riley's compositions tip their cap to Jazz, direct a friendly nod toward Flamenco by way of Africa and extend a hearty handshake to the Indian traditions but rather than being a superficial search for novelty they bear witness to a restless imagination and dedication to an art inherited not just from his composer father, Terry, but from those folk traditions nurtured by a longstanding heritage of sincerity, spirit and devotion. It is perhaps apposite that the name Gyan, chosen by Terry's musical guru, Pandit Pran Nath means knowledge. Subversion of genres or radical reordering of stylistic boundaries is of no consequence here.
With this group Riley has shifted his focus from note perfect through composed material toward improvisation. This encourages the music to live and breathe anew with each performance. His interest in improvisation, far from taking the form of a dramatic Damoclesian conversion, took root in his formative musical experiences. Riley stresses that improvisation has been a cornerstone of his approach to the guitar since he won his first one at a raffle in a music store aged 11. The seeds of Gyan's longstanding interest in improvisation were sown by a childhood that exposed him to the eclectic musical tastes of his father and later cultivated through father-son performances often built around improvisation. It has bubbled to the surface in his own music via a slow burning trajectory that has always run concomitant with his classical conservatory training.
It is of course a reflection of the continuing mockery music makes of the limits of language that we grasp like drowning men to driftwood for the nearest simile or tortured metaphor on which to hang the music that pours from these musicians. It is with this in mind that we scribes should lay down our pens and declare 'enough'. Enough talk, enough words, let these wonderful musicians take you where these impoverished words cannot tread.
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