Hafez Modirzadeh, saxophones
Tim Volpicella, guitar
Stan Poplin, bass
Keshav Batish, drums

Commanding saxophonist and expansive musical thinker Hafez Modirzadeh brings a new quartet of Northern California improvisers to explore his latest set of compositions. Modirzadeh has spent decades bridging jazz vocabulary with the sonorities and syntax of non-Western musics. His work is influenced as much by the tuning systems of Persian and Turkish music, Filipino kulintang, and Indonesian gamelan as it is by the harmolodic lyricism of Ornette Coleman and the gritty chromaticism of Thelonious Monk. On a mission to liberate musical expression from the homogenizing influence of equal temperament, Modirzadeh pursues a music of liberation through personal resonance discovered through new tuning systems based on the natural harmonic series. His latest release on Pi Recordings, Facets, was praised as “sublime, genre-defying music” (All About Jazz) and “a shimmering liberation” (I Care if You Listen).