A Fresh Take

Eugene Marlow’s Heritage Ensemble is a quintet devoted to the performance of Hebraic and original melodies in various jazz, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and neo-classical styles. It is a reflection of the mixing of cultures that has increasingly evolved in the world of music in recent decades.

Since its first public performance in the mid-1990s at New York’s Symphony Space, the personnel and repertoire have also evolved. Among the group’s members is multi-Grammy nominee drummer Bobby Sanabria whose broad performance and recording experience adds immeasurably to the current album; percussionist Cristian Rivera complements Sanabria’s rhythmic forays with his own virtuosity; saxophonist Michael Hashim’s adds just the right blend of jazz and Middle-Eastern sensibilities; and bassist Frank Wagner provides that strong bass line underpinning to the quintet’s arrangements, an element crucial to the group’s frequent, spontaneous musical departures.

The Heritage Ensemble’s first album “Making the Music Our Own” (MEII Enterprises) was released in 2006. The recording was an agglomeration of tracks recorded years earlier by other players. In the last few years, however, The Heritage Ensemble’s arrangements have not only grown in number, they have also evolved. The need to record another album was obvious. The first result was: “Celebrations: Festive Melodies from the Hebraic Songbook” (MEII Enterprises 2010). Most of the tracks are melodies from the Chanukah and Purim festivals.

The second result is “A Fresh Take.” This CD is a re-record of all the tracks on “Making the Music Our Own,” plus an addition to the quintet’s repertoire, “Adon Olam.” This track is the most highly improvised of all the arrangements. What you hear are completely unstructured, improvised lines once the group gets past the thematic material. We also added the wonderful strong voice of classically trained Rachel Kara Perez.

“A Fresh Take” (2011) and “Celebrations” (2010), like their predecessor “Making the Music Our Own” (2006), continue the group’s exploration of the “performance” possibilities of Hebraic melodies in terms of chords, rhythmic patterns, meter, and melodic structure. But The Heritage Ensemble is more than a performance repertoire of contemporary arrangements of melodies from the Hebraic songbook.

The very name of the quintet has meaning. It was chosen because we recognize that whatever we perform today is based largely on what has come before. We have inherited melodies from an evolving Jewish culture, some of which are hundreds of years old, but they have endured over time to become highly familiar wherever in the world they are sung or played. The texts to which the melodies are attached are even more rooted in the past, yet we still find meaning in them in the present. Just as the Jewish peoples and many, many other cultures around the world over time have adapted to changing conditions and evolved their cultural values in response, The Heritage Ensemble, too, represents an aesthetic expression of inexorable adaptation and evolution.

Thanks for listening.
Eugene Marlow, Ph.D. Founder/Arranger/Leader/Keyboards
The Heritage Ensemble

June 2011

“. . .its mix of tradition and a more contemporary and freely-improvised approach points to a very interesting future, indeed. Marlow's Heritage Ensemble continues on its intriguing, groove-laden and inspiring musical journey.”
─ Bruce Lindsay
Allaboutjazz.com

“Marlow enlists [multi-Grammy-nominee] Bobby Sanabria and his new pals to take a new Afro-Cuban jazz look at traditional Jewish melodies. . . .The players are all first class cats and the result is a dandy fresh take, just like the title says.”
─ Chris Spector
Midwest Record

“Eugene Marlow and his Heritage Ensemble pull the rabbit out the hat again with their latest album, A Fresh Take, blending jazz and Jewish music themes with great flair and musicianship."
─ Mike Gerber
Author of Jazz Jews, Host of the Kosher Jam Internet radio show on UK Jazz Radio

“I love these guys. . . .It swings like mad, is uniformly well-played and brightens at every instant.”
─ Jeff Simon
Buffalo News

“The Heritage Ensemble is doing something no one else is doing in quite this way. And they do it very well. Needless to say, the diaspora. . .can become a center, musically speaking. It does here. I certainly recommend this one.”
─ Grego Applegate Edwards
gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com

“. . . if you enjoyed the Ensemble’s adaptation of those songs [on the “Celebrations” CD], chances are very good you’ll enjoy these adaptations as well.”
─ S. Victor Aaron
Half Note

Title: A Fresh Take

Catalog #: J-5-2011

Release date: 2011
UPC: 002613217
©2011 MEII Enterprises/BMI