Hailed by Downbeat for her “remarkable artistic facility” and by The New York Times for her “remarkable balance of fluidity and restless creativity,” New York-based flutist/composer and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow Jamie Baum is proud to announce the release of her sixth CD as a leader, Bridges, featuring The Jamie Baum Septet+. The highly anticipated follow-up to her 2013 recording In This Life, Bridges offers yet another recording of incredible depth, beauty, spirituality, undiluted zeal and is the culmination of Baum’s search for common links between some of the world’s great religious music traditions. While conducting research for her Guggenheim Fellowship Award, Baum explains, “I found there to be very deep connections going back centuries, between certain types of Jewish music (my earliest musical influences), and Muslim/Arabic and Hindu/South Asian music.” Exploring these musical connections, and composing new music inspired by her findings, became the focus of Bridges. Baum’s advanced harmonic sensibility and sonic imagination, beautifully brought to life by the stellar members of her long-running ensemble, proves yet again the capacity of modern jazz to absorb and transform music of diverse traditions, without sacrificing the improvisatory element at the core of jazz’s identity. In her album notes Baum cites Wikipedia’s definition of the word “bridge,” one that seems to sum up her artistic mission here: “a structure built to span physical obstacles without closing the way underneath.” At the same time, Baum’s musical wanderings highlight something even deeper: our shared humanity, and the common threads that run throughout our history
