Album Notes

"Lore of the Land" marks Sonic Explorers' fourth release on their own independent label, Nada Brahma Records. Led by Boston trumpeter and composer Jerry Sabatini, the group performs original music combining modern jazz and other American music styles with ethnic Balkan and Eastern European folk music. Sabatini was recently recognized as a finalist by the Massachusetts Cultural Council for compositions featured on this CD in the MCC 2007 Music Composition Awards. This CD features the band in quartet and quintet settings. The players are:
Jerry Sabatini - trumpet, Rich Ardizone - trombone,
Phil Sargent - guitar; John Funkhouser - bass, Mike Connors - drums.

"We've been playing most of the material on this record at live shows for several years now," explains Sabatini, the group's leader, "and so we're real comfortable with everything about performing it. To press a CD of this music was difficult in the sense that since it is so highly improvised that every take of the same tune was radically different, and so choosing a quintisential version became almost impossible. My main goal with this recording was that in contrast with our last release, "So Far, So Near" (2002 Nada Brahma Records), we are a smaller group ... quartet and some quintet, which as a whole across the entire CD leaves each player with more time and space to develop their own style and communicate with each other. We’ve been developing this band for the last 12 years and have always been getting deeper and deeper into our own personal styles and how we communicate through improvised music. We’ve traveled through bebop, post modern, modal and avant gard jazz to world and ethnic music loaded with odd rhythmic meters and exotic scales to 20th century classical to funk and latin jazz and are currently settled on a sound that is both uniquely our own and has wide appeal to fans of instrumental jazz, world and improvisational music. What comes next is hard to say, but I will say that we've always and will always be true to our own inspirations. We listen to a lot of music that covers a lot of different styles and we live in this world with our eyes wide open, so our music reflects all these influences. In it's truest sense we play instrumental modern folk music."

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