If cellist / composer Janel Leppin’s 2022 debut album with her Ensemble Volcanic Ash was a creative eruption, her follow up To March Is to Love is a glowing magma flow that greatly expands her singular band’s sonic terrain. The project thrums with immediacy as Leppin and her all-star sextet honor their musical ancestors and reflect on disquieting times. "This is new music recorded in one day live in the studio, " she says. "I was thinking a lot politically while writing this album, and wanted to lean into a message of hope, but not shying away from the reality. Some pieces are quite intense, some coming from personal experience and drawing on modern classical influence. "
With its volatile mix of composition and improvisation, Leppin’s densely orchestrated music could be called rambunctious chamber jazz, but she’s carved out her own niche shaped by the particular contours of her collaborators. Best known as half of the experimental duo Janel and Anthony, which she co-leads with her husband guitarist Anthony Pirog, Leppin melds an illustrious array of Washington D. C. -area talent into an expressive organism that surges, expands, ebbs and dances in multiple directions at once.
Slimmed down a little since the first album, To March Is to Love again features Leppin and Pirog, tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, alto saxophonist Sarah Hughes, and the commanding rhythm section tandem of bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Larry Ferguson. While there’s no shortage of virtuosity, Ensemble Volcanic Ash is more concerned with acutely calibrated interplay and sky-shattering solos than with a lot of free improvisation.
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