Tomorrow Calling

It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. -Robert H. Goddard Jazz musicians confront - and, ideally, embrace - the challenge of melding yesterday's traditions, today's conventions, and tomorrow's potential. This art's core forms and traditions - the blues, the groove, the jam - are both old and ageless. At the same time, tomorrow is always calling to offer new ideas on tweaking the familiar to shape the new. For more than 20 years, this balancing act has been a core animating value of the Terry Gordon Quintet. We see this again in TGQ's fourth CD, Tomorrow Calling. This rich blend of tradition and innovation shows why TGQ has come to embody crisp musical excellence enriched by fearlessness in composition and performance. As always, TGQ respects traditions and memories. Blues for Tanner is a 12-bar blues that honors the memory of a child who succumbed to leukemia. (Trumpeter Gordon wrote the tune minutes before performing for heroes from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.) Saxophonist Eric Walentowicz's The Sound evokes and honors the sound of Stan Getz. And drummer Matthew Maguire's ballad I Remember Patti eulogizes a lifelong friend who died too young. Other tunes embrace newer jazz traditions that are nonetheless firmly rooted in the art form: A deep-pocketed funk by bassist Bill Lawrence. . . straight-ahead romps on tunes with odd forms or no form. . . and the trademark Gordon originals with shifting time signatures, unconventional heads, and clich-free roadmaps. Goddard's insight applies to jazz as well as rocket science: Yesterday's dreams shape today's hopes and tomorrow's reality. Tomorrow is always calling - and the Terry Gordon Quintet always answers.