Before My Life by Tim O'Dell

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Owen Cordle --JazzTimes

"This is a really fine recording, generous in terms of playing, with considered compositions and a ton of spirit."

Jason Bivins --Cadence

" . . . Meditating on alto, Tim sounds like 'Trane did on Central Park West . . ." John Barrett --Jazz USA

"This is the sound of . . . expanding American art.”

James Nichols --All About Jazz

" . . . A fine new voice on alto . . . loose and swinging and broadly expressive . . ." Stuart Broomer --Cadence

TIM O'DELL'S BIOGRAPHY:

Composer/Saxophonist/Educator, Tim O'Dell, was born in Lebanon, Oregon in 1966 and moved to the east coast in 2001 from the Chicago scene. In Chicago, O'Dell has performed at such premier venues as the Jazz Showcase, the Hot House and the Bop Shop with some of the city's finest musicians and recently released his Ancient Pines album for Chicago's Southport record label.

O'Dell also performs with, and composes for new music ensembles in Boston and he performs and records around New England in a wide variety of musical styles. The Matt Langley/Tim O’Dell Quartet, a New England group featuring Luther Gray and James Lyden, have a new recording coming in 2007.

As a recording artist for Southport Records, O'Dell has been acclaimed by the critics (see CD Reviews). His 2005, Ancient Pines CD featuring Chicagoans Tatsu Aoki and Ryan Shultz, has been highly praised as was Tim’s previous Southport release, Before My Life, which features ten of Tim's diverse compositions for jazz sextet. In 1998, O'Dell was a featured soloist on the popular Southport CD, Finally Elijah, featuring vocalist Elijah Levi and in that year Tim also released Live in Iowa City with the Chicago-based Red Fire Ant Trio.

O'Dell’s recordings have been broadcast on radio stations around the world and he has been invited to appear in Brazil, Japan, Portugal and Greece. Tim has performed with artists such as Danilo Perez, Tim Hagans, George Garzone, Bill McHenry, Louis Bellson, David Berkman, John Carlson, Gunther Schuller, Willie Pickens, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, Tatsu Aoki, Ryan Shultz, George Russell and The Temptations.

Dr. O'Dell holds a Master of Music degree in Jazz Studies from the New England Conservatory and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Saxophone from the University of Iowa. At NEC he studied composition with Jimmy Giuffre, William Thomas McKinley and George Russell; and saxophone with George Garzone and Kenneth Radnofsky. At Iowa he studied saxophone with Ronald Tyree and Paul Scea; and composition with Donald Martin Jenni.

O’Dell is currently Saxophone/Jazz Studies instructor at the University of Southern Maine and from 1993 to 2001 was Director of Jazz Studies and Assistant Professor of Saxophone at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Tim is a highly sought after clinician and adjudicator, and maintains a thriving saxophone/composition studio out of his home in Brunswick, Maine where he lives with his wife and two sons.

LINER NOTES for BEFORE MY LIFE by NEIL TESSER, author The PLAYBOY Guide To Jazz (Plume):

"Landscapes and homelands.

Tim O’Dell envisions homelands, sees their landscapes, pours them into sound, presses them into tiny-pitted aluminum discs that enter your home, play you the pictures, take you away.

Where? To scenes as amorphic as the distant future (“We Will Be There”), and as specific as the sturdy fingertips of the music’s bassist (“Mr. Aoki”). To the Homer Winslow sobriety of a becalmed sea (“Ship’s Wake”) and the synaptic hilarity of the human subconsciousness (“Id”). From the bustling symmetry of “Fire Ants” to the seraphic solo saxophony of “Angel And The Boys,” Heaven and Earth and much of what lies between.

Homelands and landscapes – outposts of the imagination.

But who’d have believed the prairie – the prairie! – could yield so many of them, so many different outposts?

Tim O’Dell, and all the musicians who play Before My Life, come from the prairie, and despite the breadth and depth of the landscapes seen here, all the music they play could have come from no place else. Rock Island, Illinois, on the Iowa border, where Tim O’Dell and Steve Grismore live and teach at Augustana College; Chicago – home of the others – Chicago to Rock Island, it’s only 155 miles, three hours but only if you drive too slow and run into traffic. Not so bad, really – three hours on the prairie. Not even so bad to spend an entire adult life on the prairie, stretching from the carbuncled shores of Lake Michigan across the flatland contours beneath the man-made mountains and canyons, under the hi-rise hills and bungalowed bumps that form the city’s margins, past the airport out by exurbs and pastures, farmland featureless to the untrained eye, all the way to I-O-Way.

A new sound has emerged from late 20th-century Chicago, from the ghosts of blues bars and jive joints, reaching out to the edgy tendrils of avant-gardes from Satchmo to Lennie T to Muhal to Kenny V*, rough but not always jagged, jumpy but focused, concrete abstractions of landscapes and homelands. The prairie leaves its mark.

This openness, this unbounded stretch, this beckoning expanse of space that mystified and enthralled the first outsiders to see it – the prairie itself provides the perspective. Miles Davis and John Lewis, who both birthed the cool, were born in Illinois; Bix Beiderbecke, who conceived the notion in the first place with his clean uncluttered lines that point at far-off vanishing-points, was born in Iowa. Lee Konitz grew up in Chicago, pushed Lennie’s ideas toward Braxton but also toward Tim O’Dell, who like Braxton has left his mark as a composer and a classicist and the leader of ensembles on the border between the African-American and the Euro-centric. Braxton gave them to the Chicago trombonists he hired for his band, George Lewis and Ray Anderson, and aren’t we getting close to Ryan Shultz in this family tree?

At the other end of the isolated straightaway, in almost Iowa, Tim O’Dell finds his common ground with these musicians and hammers together his ten-sided exhibition, irresistable portraits of ten times as many emotions, with plenty of room for them all to breathe.

The prairie leaves its mark.

Homeland and landscape."

* Louis Armstrong, Lennie Tristano, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ken Vandermark

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