Trumpeter Julien Knowles, fresh out of graduating from Herbie Hancock’s Institute of Jazz at UCLA, has put together and ambitious debut album melding post bop jazz with Devin Daniels/as, Javier Santiago/p, Dario Bizio/b and Benjamin Ring/dr with an occasional string quartet for a rich mosaic of musical ideas. With the strings, Knowles is elegiac on “Opening”, rich and textured for “Moon Theater” and languid for “End of the Night”. Great ideas for thoughtful evenings.
In a quintet setting, Bizio lopes a bouncing cadence for the leader on “The Boot” , and the band delivers a Miles Davis ESP feel to “”Duende” and slightly abstract “Adam’s Street Banana”. Knowles’ horn glows in the dark for his aria “Solo Intro” before segueing into a pretty “Etude” blended with Daniels’ cirrus of an alto sax. When’s this guy hitting LA?