Jack DeJohnette has played with almost all the architects of modern jazz history, from the members of the AACM to Coltrane, Miles, Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans and is, of course, currently a member of the world’s most celebrated piano trio, Keith Jarrett’s "Standards" band. For a quarter-century the drummer has also been a bandleader in his own right. Oneness joins a line of distinguished groups that includes New Directions and Special Edition and is perhaps Jack’s most all-embracing unit to date: its members share the leader’s utopian vision of a multi-directional music that includes, but is not limited to, jazz. The heart of the band is the uncanny rhythmic alliance between DeJohnette and Don Alias, first tested on Miles’s innovative On The Corner and revitalized on the road with Herbie Hancock’s The New Standard project.
Oneness
Jack DeJohnette, Jerome Harris, Don Alias, Michael Cain
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02:04 - 2Free Above Sea
05:54 - 3Priestesses Of The Mist
15:10 - 4Jack In
12:35 - 5From The Heart / C.M.A.
27:32
The potential of two drummers working together was first emphasised for the bandleader in the mid-60s. When he played with Coltrane, he partnered Rashied Ali. "It's a collective sound you're going for," DeJohnette told Jazz Times, "it's like you hear a whole tribe of people singing something: collective energy." In Miles's band, DeJohnette traded ideas and sounds with a shifting cast of percussionists, including on On The Corner , an ambitious polystylistic undertaking its own right, Don Alias. A more recent reunion of the drummers on Herbie Hancock's The New Standard project indicated that their percussive alliance had lost none of its potency; their tessellated, interlocking accents give the Oneness band its throbbing heart. Together, Jack and Don introduce the band with a celebratory "Welcome Blessing" on this ECM album. Alias's numerous credits include work with Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, Chick Corea, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, Joe Lovano and Carla Bley. The emphasis on hand drums in the new band extends the concept of "earth rhythms" that DeJohnette sketched out on his previous ECM disc Dancing with Nature Spirits.
Pianist Michael Cain was introduced to ECM listeners on the aforementioned Nature Spirits, which led in turn to his own leader date debut on ECM, Circa ("sparkling chamber jazz" - Down Beat), released early in 1997. Cain, however, has been associated with DeJohnette since 1990 and his been a member of almost all the drummer's own projects since then, including the Special Edition band. He has also toured extensively with Dewey Redman and played with, amongst others, Dave Holland, John Scofield, and Vernon Reid. His gravitation toward DeJohnette's bands was all but inevitable. At 31, the youngest member of the band, Cain envisaged a multi-directional music with jazz as its centrepoint from a very young age. He studied jazz and classical music at North Texas State University, and further classical research at the University of Southern California was followed by graduate research at CalArts, where he investigated the musics of Ghana, Bali and India as well as traditional western forms. Elements of all these musics have found their way into Cain's writing and improvising.
The versatile Jerome Harris began his tenure with Sonny Rollins's group as an electric bassist and in the course of a decade with the master saxophonist became the band's guitar player. Rollins sessions of the late 80s, such as Falling In Love With Jazz and Here's To The People, brought him together with DeJohnette, in whose Oneness ensemble he plays both his instruments. Harris has played furthermore with Bill Frisell, George Russell, Amina Claudine Myers, Bob Moses, Hank Roberts, Bob Stewart, Mark Helias. He has also recorded as a leader; his own groups have included Ray Anderson, Marty Ehrlich, Jay Hoggard, Bobby Previte and others.
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