Album Notes

Rolldown is the 14th entry in 482 Music’s ongoing Document
Chicago series and the recorded debut of Chicago-based
vibraphonist/composer Jason Adasiewicz’s four year-old working band of the same name, featuring fellow scene stalwarts Josh Berman, Aram Shelton, Jason Roebke and Frank Rosaly.

In a preview of one of the Rolldown’s live shows, the Chicago Reader’s Peter Margasak wrote, many of the songs on the band’s debut “recall the brilliantly oblique postbop material Bobby Hutcherson recorded for Blue Note in the late 60s, but others are based on gently rippling, coloristic passages. Adasiewicz lays down spiky, sweet-and-sour harmonies behind the solos, and his own improvisations are jagged tangles that make unexpected turns and recapitulations.”

The release of Rolldown is the culmination of a long association between Adasiewicz and the label that includes recordings as a sideman with Aram Shelton’s Arrive, drummer/composer Harris Eisenstadt and Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly. He also appears on two tracks from the sampler that launched the Document Chicago series in 2003.