Bristle
Bristle, the Northern California based sax-and-strings-fueled chamber jazz quartet of Randy McKean, Cory Wright, Murray Campbell, and Lisa Mezzacappa, channels the individual virtuosity of its members into intricate group interactions that blur the line between composition and cooperative game strategies. Formed in 2009, Bristle has toured throughout California and the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle to Bakersfield, bringing their Art Ensemble meets Kronos Quartet sound to the SF Bay Area’s Garden of Memory and West Oakland Sound Series, Sacramento’s In the Flow Festival and the California Gold Country’s Col. MaCaw’s Magical Cure-All. Their music, called “fun and thought-provoking” (Memory Select), and full of “shrewd harmonic twists” (Downtown Music Gallery), is featured on their CDs Bulletproof (Edgetone, 2012) and Future(s) Now(s) (Queen Bee, 2014), the latter named one of the Top California Jazz Releases of 2014 by KQED. Their latest release, Archimera, is coming May 2025 from Queen Bee.
In its first release in 10 years, the Northern California chamber jazz ensemble Bristle unleashes Archimera, a hybrid creation epitomizing its unique four-as-one group aesthetic and showcasing its wide-ranging sonic explorations that combine innovative composition and virtuosic improvisation in surprising and fresh ways. Archimera is Bristle’s answer to the riddle what do you get when a Midwestern sax nerd mind melds with a SoCal reed master, a Staten Island metal-turned-jazz bass player, and a Scottish fiddler/orchestral oboist?
Archimera presents the band commanding a dizzying array of instruments and approaches yet operating as a single entity as it navigates the wily, playful and extraordinarily unique compositions of co-leaders Randy McKean and Cory Wright. Wright kicks the group into action with his Fluxx-like choose-your-own-adventure creation Lines of Work and the cinematic Basset, which envisions a literal fox hunt, with crafty strings pitted against hound-like low reeds. McKean’s compositions Wraparound, a shifting array of angular puzzle pieces, and Thicket, a Zen-like etude of near-unison melodies, epitomize Bristle’s ability to play as one instrument. Wright’s elegiac arrangement of iconic Bay Area songwriting duo Ramon and Jessica’s Flight II, and McKean’s snapshot of a winter month in Banff, Canada, Vape Trail, end the album with an ephemeral vanishing point.