Oy, what I week … get­ting cyber­stalked (there is a law against that, right?) … deal­ing with this lousy Smarch weather … try­ing to fig­ure out what the hell is going on with “Lost” (why are the sur­vivors “can­di­dates,” and for what? Mayor of the island? In that case, I vote for Hur­ley) … it’s been a strange and not alto­gether pleas­ant few days.

Ver­ily, though ye be plas­tered by Yang, Yin will soon appear to pick you up. My pick-up came this morn­ing in the form of  a very nice write-up of Not Cool by Greg Edwards over at Gap­ple­gate Music Review. “Chris Kelsey shows that he is at the fore­front of the fiery reedists today. The music is exhil­a­rat­ing, over­flow­ing, bril­liant,” says Greg, a line  sure to inspire exces­sive blush­ing and/or preen­ing. Even if you don’t read the review of Not Cool, head over to Gap­ple­gate and check out Greg’s reviews of Con­nie Crothers/Michael Bisio, Albert Ayler, Toby Dri­ver, Roy Har­ris (yes, the clas­si­cal com­poser), Evan Parker, and many and sundry other intrigu­ing musi­cians. To be con­sid­ered in such com­pany is an honor, indeed.

[Par­don the self-promotion, but if I don’t tell you, who will?]

Writer Brian Olewnick, whose tastes gen­er­ally run to less jazzy fare, nev­er­the­less has some very nice things to say about Not Cool on his blog Just Out­side. You can read it here.

Thanks, Mr. O!

Fol­low­ing months of antic­i­pa­tion (on my part, at least), I’m happy to announce the release of the first album on my new Tzazz Kry­tyk label, Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) by The Chris Kelsey 4.

The album is the first to fea­ture my alto and tenor sax work, and I play more than a bit of soprano on it, as well.

For a  lim­ited time I’m mak­ing an MP3 ver­sion of the album avail­able free of charge to read­ers of ChrisKelsey.com. There’s no catch – I’m not even ask­ing for an e-mail address. I’m hop­ing that, if you like it, you’ll pur­chase the CD ver­sion, and/or a copy of my solo soprano sax disc on Cadence Jazz, Beyond Is and Is Not. You can also con­tribute an amount of your choice by hit­ting the “Donate” but­ton on the side­bar (it doesn’t mag­i­cally take money out of your pocket, but directs you to my bag man, oth­er­wise known as Paypal).

If you trust in my genius and would like to buy the CD ver­sion, music-unheard, that’s ok, too. Just click here (or one of the pre­vi­ous two bold­faced links … I’m takin’ no chances). The album will soon be found on eMu­sic, iTunes, and a bun­cha them other lower-case/higher-case retail­ers, as well. But why go there when you can get it here for free, with my bless­ing? For a lim­ited time, of course.

Down­load the 128 kbps MP3 ver­sion of Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) here. Enjoy!

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Not Cool ( … as in, “The Oppo­site of Paul Desmond”) by Chris Kelsey is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I’ve been doing a lot of writ­ing lately, most of which has found its way onto this blog. But I’ve got another big project near­ing com­ple­tion on which I’m also spend­ing a great deal of time: Not Cool (not in the Urkel or Revenge of the Nerds sense, but musi­cally … as in the oppo­site of Paul Desmond and Gerry Mul­li­gan), the soon-to-be-released new album by my band, The Chris Kelsey 4.

“The 4″ is my lat­est group, which greatly resem­bles my pre­vi­ous group, with the addi­tion of the superb young trum­peter Chris DiMeglio. Join­ing the two-horn (or four-horn, if you con­sider that I played soprano, alto, and tenor saxes on the ses­sion) front line are my long-time bud­dies and rhythm sec­tion, Fran­cois Gril­lot on bass and Jay Rosen on drums.

The music on Not Cool is the nat­ural cul­mi­na­tion of every­thing I’ve done in my career so far. It melds the non-tonal, free­bop­pish com­po­si­tional tech­niques I used on prior CIMP record­ings (Wish­ing You Were Here and The Crookedest Straight Line, Vols. 1 & 2, among oth­ers) with the loose, expres­sion­is­tic, high-energy neo-Ayler-esque energy music I played in my early days on the Down­town NYC free jazz scene (none of which had a com­mer­cial release). In some ways it’s the most chal­leng­ing music I’ve ever pre­sented to my lis­ten­ers. It is undoubt­edly the most emo­tion­ally charged and direct I’ve ever recorded. Lest you infer that it’s just a unstruc­tured free blow, fear not. Despite its no-holds-barred nature, this is  my most sophis­ti­cated work in terms of com­po­si­tion and form. I think it is, quite sim­ply, the best thing I’ve ever done.

Of course, you might have some­thing to say about that. The album will soon be avail­able as a CD and in var­i­ous down­load­able for­mats (includ­ing a free option … that’s right, the entire album gratis, cost­less, given away freely), which I’ll explain in greater detail in the next few days. Much is still up in the air, but the music itself is mas­tered and ready to go. I’m look­ing at an Octo­ber 1 release and cross­ing my fingers!