Joshua Breakstone. Photo by Steven Sussman.
For guitarist Joshua Breakstone, inspiration comes from the tune, and his cello quartet, inspired by a happy accident, provides an unusual vehicle for elucidating the tune’s heart. This Thursday, the quartet—with Mike Richmond (cello), Chris Conner (bass), and John Trentacosta (drums)—will explore tunes on Breakstone’s latest release, 88 (Capri Records), an homage to pianists, which has been rising on the airplay charts. Continue reading
Joshua Breakstone
With the Wind and the Rain (Capri Records)
A Review
Fans of old-school jazz guitar will welcome the arrival of the latest recording from Joshua Breakstone, who doesn’t just play jazz, but celebrates it in his playing. On his latest
venture, With the Wind and the Rain,
Breakstone and his longtime mates—bassist Lisle Atkinson and drummer Eliot Zigmund—invite cellist Mike Richmond to join in on four of the nine tracks.
Breakstone loves the sound of the cello, which, he tells me, found its way into the jazz lexicon in the ’50s and ’60s, when a number of premier jazz bassists began featuring the instrument on recordings. As he says in his liner notes, the possibilities of the cello-augmented trio really
flowered once he began hearing the quartet as a string section with percussion, rather than as a trio with added cello. The strings play as a section on the head of three of the four tracks with cello, and as Breakstone said in phone conversation, this sort of arrangement “makes you
attend to the music much more closely, and really brings out accents of the whole sound of the strings.”