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21 May 2021
It’s great to hear a band of young musicians who have been playing and developing together. It’s utterly common in some forms of popular music the realm of the garage band that finally makes a recording but somewhat less common in jazz, where established leaders tend to take younger musicians into their bands. A group of unknown 20-somethings have to develop a sense of self-identity and cooperation that can help them to do something fresh and what’s more wonderful in jazz than those qualities?
Nortonk are just such a quartet, named for their professor Kevin Norton (from the front half of his email address, apparently) at the William Paterson College jazz program. Norton is a drummer with a history of bold and diverse performance on the “downtown” New York scene (with Anthony Braxton, Phillip Johnston of the Microscopic Septet, Fred Frith, John Zorn, Steve Lehman, and many others) and his students are equally open-ended in their playing. The format, however, co