Product Description The spawn of a badly ventilated New York boiler room/rehearsal space, Twelve 20 Six has hammered out an extensive repertoire of instrumental arrangements for drums, acoustic bass, guitar, tuba, trombone, saxophone and assorted noise generators in New York's hotbeds of jazz talent such as The Knitting Factory, 55 Bar and CB's Gallery. This release appropriately documents the gamut they have boldly run, from Prokofiev's ballet, to backbeats, to out-and-out mayhem. About the Artist Comprised of six performers who are not very funny, twelve 20 six more successfully makes music that could be new to you or at least a friend of yours. These concubines of sound, all born a few years after Steve Reich bought a razor blade and an XL-1, after Cannonball Adderley recorded "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" before Paul Motian shaved his head, have taken advantage of the information technology of their youth and assimilated a broad range of approaches to music into a new pluralism that aims like hell to inspire your children's children. This pluralism will admit that it reaches mostly into American traditions from the last century which have barely weaned themselves from Europe and Africa, but who's counting? The music pours out of a highly improvising mindset even though extensive arrangements have become a staple for this group. The most rampant influences are from the harmony and concept fathered by Ives and Copland, the open improvising music of Ornette Coleman and Paul Bley, the highly composed sound of George Crumb and Tan Dun, the rock and roll, the hip-hop, the folk singers, the film scores- all of these things they grew up with. You will hear stretches of possibly pretentious harmony, quirky and/or romantic melody, unlikely sounds from our environment and elsewhere, and, oddly enough, even a groove at times.
