Stephan Crump's Rosetta Trio

Event information

Promoting their third album - Thwirl - on Sunnyside Records, tonight's performance will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio's Jazz on 3.

When it feels right, stick with it...and keep digging. Rosetta Trio has done just that, and on Thwirl they achieve a breakthrough of their own. For this is the third album of original compositions by this intimately powerful all-string chamber ensemble.

“ingenious originals” (The New Yorker)

Many discerning jazz listeners have come to know Stephan Crump from his fourteen
years of collaboration with Vijay Iyer, particularly in the core trio which created
Accelerando and the Grammy-nominated Historicity. Crump brought together Rosetta Trio for the first time in 2005 to record an album of pieces written in the aftermath of 9/11. That “engaging and sublime meeting” (Signal to Noise) of Crump on acoustic bass with guitarists Liberty Ellman and Jamie Fox, produced Rosetta (2006), which was greeted enthusiastically by fans, radio, and the press. “Here is a string ensemble for the new century!” raved All About Jazz NY. Their second album, Reclamation (2010), declared “a low-key marvel” (JazzTimes) and noted for its “bareness in emotion” (NPR), was much more than a follow-up effort, though it was the earlier album that gave the trio its name and its mission: to inhabit the dynamic and rhythmic flexibility of a drumless ensemble and embrace its challenges and expanded responsibilities; to reject restrictions of genre; to explore different territories of feel, texture, color; to groove. Recorded after eight years of collaboration and on the heels of a two-week European tour, Thwirl captures Rosetta Trio not only at peak telepathy, but charting new territories of shape and feel.