The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – All is Sound (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 25:44 minutes | 486 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mississippi Records
Portland’s finest practitioners of Great Black Music offering to the planet! All is Sound could not be a more apt title for this. Through saxophone, cello, piano, and flutes The Cosmic Tones Research Trio created a truly beautiful record. All Is Sound breaks new ground. At its heart, it’s healing/meditation music, but the Gospel and Blues roots are in there too…as well as hints of forward-looking Spiritual jazz. As sincere a record as you could ever hope for. Music is indeed the healing force of the universe.
Formed by alto sax player and composer Roman Norfleet, cellist and multi-instrumentalist Harlan Silverman, and pianist Kennedy Verrett—who also plays a wide variety of wind instruments—, The Cosmic Tones Research Trio focuses on healing music. In All is Sound, delicate, profound melodies create peaceful, immersive soundscapes, which the group develops through their combined background in acoustic ecology, sound meditation, mindfulness, and active community involvement.
All is Sound’s title points to the openness of Portland, Oregon-based Cosmic Tones Research Trio—alto saxophonist Roman Norfleet, cellist Harlan Silverman, and pianist Kennedy Verrett. The group, whose members also play flutes, percussion, and other instruments, draw on various influences to create ambient tracks often tinged by jazz. Forerunners include Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, and other innovators who looked to Eastern and African traditions for inspiration. Additionally, there’s a clear affinity with André 3000’s 2023 album, New Blue Sun, the recordings of the Los Angeles collective Build an Ark, and artists associated with the Brainfeeder label.
Sustained tones often mark this meditative jazz-adjacent music. Touches of bluesy piano and breathy sax timbres are present, but the longer solo statements and driving trap-kit rhythms associated with jazz are absent. “Black Rest” inverts the typical relationship between melody and accompaniment. Norfleet repeatedly plays a single line on alto sax, with only slight variations, while strings and other sounds continually morph around it. The briefest track, “A Sleeping Planet,” might also be the one that comes closest to feeling like a song. A saxophone melody unspools over a catchy bass ostinato, electric piano, and low-end drones on this blissed-out keeper.
Thick-toned bowed bass, percussion, and didgeridoo craft a soundscape topped by an Eastern-inflected wooden flute on album closer, “The Offering.” Sax and higher string pitches eventually appear, slightly shifting the solemn mood: if this composition is a kind of prayer, this section is where it ascends. It’s a satisfying end to this pleasing album. – Fred Cisterna
Tracklist:
1-1. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – Creation (07:00)
1-2. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – A Sleeping Planet (02:28)
1-3. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – Peace Prayer (04:41)
1-4. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – Black Rest (03:12)
1-5. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – Nada Brahma (03:59)
1-6. The Cosmic Tones Research Trio – The Offering (04:23)
