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The Dan Cray Trio is one of those forward thinking outfits that use jazz as a healthy means to an end, but not as its reason for living. Sure, high end jazz players from Geoff Keezer to Brad Mehldau have explored current trend makers like Coldplay and Radiohead, adding the youth vote to their exuberant jazz improvisations. So it's nothing new when a trio works itself free from the old jazz ties that bind. But the Cray Trio does more than cover pop standards (which they don't do on their latest release, Over Hear Over Heard). Both exhaling history and inhaling modern harmonics and entrancing melody, the trio holds your attention whether you're eight or 80. Pounding rhythms one moment, sailing sincerely the next, Dan Cray (piano), Greg Wyser-Pratte (drums) and Clark Sommers (bass) play with a great sense of micro-dynamics and melody as in "Hammerhead," which spins and darts like tumbleweeds blown aloft in a Midwestern tornado. The Dan Cray Trio is from Chicago, after all.

Currently featured on sex TV shows like Gossip Girl, as well as in the film The Merry Gentleman and the radio program "Eight Forty-Eight" on Chicago's NPR affiliate WBEZ, Dan Cray Trio has performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival and at venues around the country to critical success, and can be seen regularly around Chicago with the city's top vocalists and instrumentalists.  The trio transfers this focus into tangible success, as their last two CDs (No One and Save Us) spent over ten weeks on the National and College Jazz Charts, while WBEZ named each among the year's best in 2003 and 2005, respectively.

Get Hammered!

Axiom-atic! Bill Cantrall wails the old school into the 22ndCentury: New York's Bill Cantrall pursues old school hard bop on his debut, Axiom. A veteran of groups led by hard hitting Latin heads like Miles Pena, Los Hermanos Morenos, and the big band, Cubarama, Cantrall--a trombonist by design--has also gigged with the legendary Gil Evans Orchestra at New York's Sweet Basil. But to these ears, Axiom, particularly the title track, recalls mid 60s Blue Note smokers like Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, Donald Byrd's The Cat Walk, and perhaps something by Horace Silver. The grooves rock and rise, everyone solos like their life is in danger, and the group's melodic heads are uniformly sweet and well executed.

Featuring New York ringers like Ryan Kisor, Sherman Irby, Stacy Dillard, Rick Germanson, Gerald Cannon and Montez Coleman, Axiom features Cantrall's distinct septet arrangements of seven original compositions, as well as two reworked standards, Cole Porter's "After You," and "Tangerine" from classic collaborators Johnny Mercer and Victor Schertzinger.