The album conveys a feeling of urgent communion and soulful expedition.
—Nate Chinen, WBGO
In the beginning there was 
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Teodross Avery's 'After The Rain: A Night For Coltrane' (Tompkins Square) Out Now
1926 - 1967
“It is a return to my roots,” says Avery, 45, who possesses a huge, brawny tone and a capacious harmonic imagination. “Listening to Trane’s music was my foundation, and this album is definitely a reintroduction to this area of my career. I’ve been busy with a lot of other stuff, but I was always playing acoustic jazz with top level cats. I wasn’t putting out albums. I was on record dates, but not my own albums. This was the perfect opportunity to make my own statement.”
He found an ideal outlet with Tompkins Square. Over its 13 years, the label has released new and reissued recordings by renowned jazz masters such as
Calvin Keys
guitarb.1942
Charles Gayle
saxophone1939 - 2023
Ran Blake
pianob.1935
Bern Nix
guitar1950 - 2017
Sonny Clark
piano1931 - 1963
George Duvivier
bassb.1920
Max Roach
drums1925 - 2007
For the Sound Room concert Avery reconnected with some of the Bay Area’s most formidable improvisers, joining forces with pianist
Adam Shulman
pianob.1979
Darrell Green
drums
Jeff Chambers
bass, acoustic1955 - 2021
“I grew up hearing Jeff with
Freddie Hubbard
trumpet1938 - 2008
Bobby Hutcherson
vibraphone1941 - 2016
Ahmad Jamal
piano1930 - 2023
With the highly cohesive band Avery delves deeply into Coltrane’s songbook, opening with a brightly burning run through “Blues Minor.” Maintaining a steady level of energy throughout the nine- minute sojourn, the quartet offers a master class in the power of a briskly swinging mid-tempo groove. The set’s longest piece, “Africa,” is also drawn from the classic 1961 album Africa/Brass, Coltrane’s debut release on Impulse! orchestrated by
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
McCoy Tyner
piano1938 - 2020
Cal Massey’s Latin-tinged “Bakai” is a piece introduced on the 1957 Prestige album Coltrane, the saxophonist’s first session as a leader (an underrated composer, Massey is due for rediscovery). Opening unaccompanied, Avery hints at the sing-song theme with a series of smeary ascending figures. As the band joins, he’s off, pushing against Green’s deft cymbal work with some extra grit in his tone. Shulman, a sought after arranger and first-call Bay Area accompanist, takes a particularly graceful, soul-steeped solo.
“Coltrane was one of the first records I bought myself, and I’ve been listening to that album ever since,” Avery says. “I liked that 12/8 rhythm. It relates to my mom, with an Ethiopian rhythmic feel. It’s a song that almost no one’s recorded. I felt like it was time.”
Of all the music that Avery explores,
Mongo Santamaria
percussion1917 - 2003
He follows the thunderous “Afro Blue” with a gorgeous rendition of Coltrane’s ballad “After the Rain.” Back on tenor, he caresses the melody, which unspools over Chambers rumbling bowed bass and Green’s shimmering cymbals. Quietly majestic, it practically begs for another ballad or two, but Avery gets back to burning. He closes the set with a blast of spiritual sustenance, offering an extended take on “Pursuance,” the third movement of Trane’s devotional masterwork A Love Supreme.
“I’ve studied all areas of his music,” Avery says. “I was just trying to take songs that were important to him and important to the real connoisseurs of his music. Africa/Brass was a really important album for him. ‘After the Rain’ isn’t his most popular ballad, but it’s a very beautiful piece and a brilliant composition.”
As Ben Ratliff writes in the album’s liner notes, the band approaches Coltrane’s music with reverence and freedom, revealing themselves in the act of interpreting iconic compositions. “The synthesis achieved here is the result of scholarship…But it is also the result of relaxing an academic mind-set, something that comes later in life—a little bit of forgetting what you’ve learned, or of finding meaning beyond the limited binary thinking of structure/no structure.”
About Teodross Avery
Born July 2, 1973 in Fairfield, California, Avery grew up in Oakland and Vacaville, where he spent most of high school. Looking for more rigorous musical training he attended Berkeley High his senior year played in the school’s award-winning jazz band under director Charles Hamilton (a mentor for future jazz stars such as
Joshua Redman
saxophoneb.1969
Dayna Stephens
saxophone, tenor
Justin Brown
drums
Wynton Marsalis
trumpetb.1961
Betty Carter
vocals1929 - 1998
Ramsey Lewis
piano1935 - 2022
It’s hard to overstate the impression Avery made when he hit New York. Within a week of moving to the city in 1995 he was playing at the Blue Note with piano legend Cedar Walton’s sextet featuring trumpet great Art Farmer. Over the next few years, he performed and recorded with veteran jazz masters such as
Hank Jones
piano1918 - 2010
Ben Riley
drums1933 - 2017
Harold Mabern
piano1936 - 2019
Bobby Watson
saxophone, altob.1953
Dee Dee Bridgewater
vocalsb.1950
Cyrus Chestnut
pianob.1963
Lewis Nash
drumsb.1958
Donald Harrison
saxophone, altob.1960
Roy Hargrove
trumpet1969 - 2018
John Scofield
guitarb.1951
Peter Bernstein
guitarb.1967
Mark Whitfield
guitarb.1966
While Avery has kept a relatively low profile on the jazz scene over the past two decades, he’s never put down his horn. After touring internationally with Lauryn Hill in the late 1990s, he started recording prolifically as a session musician in New York City, contributing to hit albums by Amy Winehouse, G-Unit All Stars, Joss Stone, and Talib Kweli. Returning to academia, he completed a PhD in Jazz Studies from the University of Southern California in 2016, and is now assistant professor of Jazz Studies and Commercial Music at California State University Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles.
Avery started gaining attention again in straight ahead circles as part of a powerhouse tenor sax tandem with
Howard Wiley
drums
Archie Shepp
saxophone, tenorb.1937
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
Chet Baker
trumpet and vocals1929 - 1988
“I had this sense I need to record an album and not be guided by piano and bass,” he says. “I needed to be in the driver’s seat as to where the harmony was going. It was like a release. When I was at USC, everything was very regimented. That’s part of the point of pursuing a doctorate. I needed to clear my intellectual palette.”
The saxophone/drums duo was pioneered of course by John Coltrane and
Rashied Ali
drums1935 - 2009
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Track Listing
Blues Minor; Bakai; Afro Blue; After the Rain; Africa; Pursuance.
Personnel
Teodross Avery
saxophoneAdditional Instrumentation
Teodross Avery: tenor & soprano saxophones; Adam Shulman: piano; Jeff Chambers: acoustic bass; Darrell Green: drums.
Album information
Title: After the Rain: A Night for Coltrane | Year Released: 2019 | Record Label: Tompkins Square
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