John Stowell-Michael Zilber Quartet at California Jazz Conservatory

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The John Stowell-Michael Zilber Quartet with Jason Lewis and John Shifflett is celebrating the release of its new Origin Records CD, Live Beauty. This recording, captured at the Jazzschool back in 2012, shows a group that has been performing and developing a unique chemistry together extensively over the past 7 years, including the 2011 Origin Release Shot Through With Beauty, a recording that made several best CD lists that year. As San Jose Mercury News' Andrew Gilbert (who put Shot Through on his NPR ten favorite jazz CDs of the year list) notes "the project is the work of an ensemble with an enticingly spacious sound marked by puckish humor...The quartet tends toward elliptical conversations and melodic digressions that depend on a rarefied level of communication."