What's Up?
"Jonathan Finlayson, in Moment & the Message, has created a great modern jazz record that also sounds like joy and feels like a dance."
—Pop Matters
"This album resonates on an emotional and intellectual level, packed with melody, depth and ideas worth stealing"
—Lucid Culture
"The best contemporary jazz is captured in its entirety in this exceptional debut"
—All About Jazz Italy
"He breathes fire, but displays finely honed command and control techniques"
—All About Jazz
"Through the tricky patterns, sudden thematic shifts and stylistic swaps on Jonathan Finlayson’s impressive debut album, one thing remains constant: the cool sense of refinement he brings to the music."
—Jazz Times
"The “trickiness” of this music is remarkably inviting. Rather than seeming technical or egg-headed, Finlayson’s themes seems natural and flowing, as if the irregular measure counts developed from breathing or walking rather than music school fancy-pantsiness. Jonathan Finlayson, in Moment & the Message, has created a great modern jazz record that also sounds like joy and feels like a dance."
—Pop Matters
"...Trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson...straddles the mathematical and the colloquial so well on this debut that he seems bound for the stature of Coleman, Lehman and Tim Berne, and even of the great Henry Threadgill before them."
—The Guardian
"This music manages a collision of complexity and almost pop-like pleasure"
—Pop Matters
"...Moment & The Message, not only displays his insightful playing and individualism but also some imposing composing skills."
—All About Jazz
"It's tight-knit music, but seductively relaxed, too."
—The Guardian
Life & Work
Bio:
Jonathan Finlayson is a disciple of the saxophonist/composer/conceptualist Steve Coleman, having joined band Five Elements in 2000 at the age of 18.
Jonathan is widely admired for his ability to tackle cutting-edge musical concepts with aplomb. He has performed and recorded in groups led by Steve Lehman, Mary Halvorson, Craig Taborn, and Henry Threadgill, and he has played alongside Von Freeman, Jason Moran, Dafnis Prieto, Vijay Iyer...
Jonathan was recognized by the New York Times as "...an incisive and often surprising trumpeter," who is "...fascinated with composition."
Born in 1982 in Berkeley, CA, Jonathan Finlayson began playing the trumpet at the age of ten in the Oakland public school system. He came under the tutelage of Bay Area legend Robert Porter, a veteran trumpeter from the bebop era, who took Finlayson under his wing; he was often seen accompanying Porter on his gigs about town and sitting in on the popular Sunday nights jam session at the Bird Cage.
Jonathan subsequently attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music where he studied with Eddie Henderson, Jimmy Owens, and Cecil Bridgewater.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).