Album Notes

Excerpts from Liner Notes "Nine Stories Wide":

"To me the trio is all about the personalities and interaction of the players," says Jonathan Kreisberg, describing the ambiance of Nine Stories Wide, his sparkling Criss-Cross debut. Following up on "Trioing," Kreisberg's excellent self-released 2002 album with bassist Johannes Weidenmuller and drummer Ari Hoenig, each a collaborator of long-standing, the 31-year-old guitarist documents a first encounter with seasoned young heavyweights Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart. The title is self-descriptive: Addressing three songbook chestnuts, a pop classic, two iconic jazz lines and three Kreisberg originals, the trio spins musical tales of capacious scope with meticulous craft and creative spirit.

Reviewing "Trioing" in the webzine "All About Jazz", David Adler, a frequent Criss-Cross contributor, offered a trenchant analysis of Kreisberg's style, noting that "his sparkling clean tone, colored with just a touch of delay, perfectly suits his fluid, legato phrasing and tasteful, complex chordal work." Adler cited Kreisberg's "command of some of the very toughest post-bop harmonic sequences," and concluded: "His lines are rhythmically crisp and precise yet never stiff, always attuned to the unpredictable, grooving flow...there's a relaxed, understated quality to the music."

On Wednesday nights for the last few years, Kreisberg has done his workshopping at La Lanterna di Vittorio, a bar on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village. "A lot of guys come down to hang and play," he says. "It's the right size room for trio, a certain intimacy where we can converse musically. For the date, I picked tunes that I've been playing there. I have arrangements for some of them, and codified some things I've improvised on the gig-for instance, the end of 'My Ideal,' which is three bars of 4/4 and a bar of 6/4, or the idea of playing 'Summertime' in 5/4 and abstracting the harmony. But mostly I kept things simple."

Well, simplicity may be in the ear of the beholder.
On "Nine Stories Wide" the young guitarist sounds like he was born to interpret the tradition on fresh terms and explore the realms beyond it.

Ted Panken