Dark Days Noah Preminger

• 1 Hummus 07:51
• 2 Hymn #1 (For Moving On) 07:45
• 3 Mopti 06:24
• 4 Casa Pueblo 06:40
• 5 FTSC 07:45
• 6 Nash's World 07:04
• 7 Sarajevo With Neira 06:24
• 8 Dark Days 06:58
• 9 Barca 06:58
• Total Runtime 01:03:49

Info for Dark Days

Although winter solstice was imminent when Noah Preminger was preparing to record his fourth Criss Cross session last December, diminishing daylight was not the reason for the album’s title. Rather, “Dark Days” reflects the eminent tenor saxophonist’s overall state of mind in 2024. “I was deep in hell,” he says, reflecting on a year when he experienced chronic health issues (since resolved) and a divorce. “It was a dark time.”

Throughout the year, Preminger could count on an opportunity “to wash away the dust of everyday life,” as Art Blakey once put it, at his weekly Friday-Saturday engagement at Wally’s Jazz Café in Boston, where he performed and developed the tunes that appear on this kinetic, conversational, virtuosically executed quartet recital. “I’ve led a group at Wally’s since 2021, when they reopened after the pandemic,” Preminger says. “It’s important because so many people go to school in Boston, and it’s a place where everybody can come and hang out and play and develop their thing. It’s been a great outlet for me to play and workshop new material as I write it. And getting to play twice a week is unheard-of.”

By dint of necessity, Preminger has deployed different personnels at Wally’s over the years, reflecting the “move-in, move- out” nature of Boston’s talented pool of student musicians who leave for greener pastures. “A beautiful thing about Wally’s is that you can play what you want,” Preminger reiterates. “It’s an opportunity to work on your own craft, your own compositions, your own bandleading, and develop a group sound – also to coach younger musicians.” During the period in question, he’s “coached” 24-year-old bassist Nick Isherwood and 21-year-old drummer Ben Fig (‘two unknowns”); completing the rhythm section is gifted Uruguayan pianist-composer Nando Michelin, 59 last December, whose 15+ leader albums include several bracing cusp-of-the-2000s dates with tenor hero Jerry Bergonzi and one of Esperanza Spalding’s earliest sessions.

This being said, Preminger assessed that his band “didn’t feel settled enough” to record. He reached out to his three partners on Dark Days, all upper-echelon, pan-stylistic practitioners of their respective instruments, who interpret the nine songs with in-the- moment imagination, impeccable chops, and a team-first attitude.

The youngster is guitarist Ely Perlman, Preminger’s occasional bandmate at Wally’s when he was enrolled at Berklee a few years ago. Now based in New York, Perlman, 26, is a member of Christian McBride’s rock-fusion group Ursa Major, and sidemans with the individualistic pianist Shai Maestro. “I love Ely’s playing,” Preminger says. “He has amazing foundational roots in jazz and swing, but also a rock-out vibe that fits some of the music I was writing for Wally’s.”

The elder statesman is pan-stylistic drum master Terreon Gully, then 51, whose c.v. includes long tours of duty with the Christian McBride Band, Geoffrey Keezer, Dianne Reeves, Lauryn Hill, and Stefon Harris. Preminger recalls bonding with him while both were sidemen on a European tour several years ago. “I thought Terreon’s approach to improvising and to being a supportive drummer fit my music well, and I like him personally,” Preminger says. “So I thought he’d be a nice call for this date.”

While Dark Days marks Preminger’s maiden voyage with Gully and Perlman, it’s his fourteenth recorded encounter with bassist Kim Cass, a close friend and musical soulmate since both were NEC undergraduates during the aughts. Cass performs on all of Preminger’s Criss Cross albums, including the dynamic 2022 trio recital, Sky Continuous (Criss1411), with Bill Stewart on drums. In my booklet notes, Preminger noted: “I write specifically for Kim. He’s one of a kind. There’s a feeling one gets when they hear something so ridiculously insane technique-wise or so profound in some way that they start laughing. That’s the feeling I get every single time I hear Kim. I get the sense from other bassists I’m friends with that Kim does stuff others can’t. The cliche would be he’s like Jaco Pastorius on upright.”

Noah Preminger, tenor saxophone
Kim Cass, double bass
Terreon Gully, drums
Ely Perlman, guitar

Recorded December 14, 2024 in Astoria, NY, USA
Engineered by Michael Marciano (recording, editing, mixing, mastering)
Produced by Jerry Teekens

Noah Preminger
“Preminger Plays Preminger” is a record of music based on and adapted from the films of the great director, Otto Preminger.

Noah Preminger has seen this film many times before, but now it’s the third time this week that he has watched “The Cardinal,” it’s the second time he’s going through it with the sound turned off. He’s searching for a scene that hooks him. When he finds it, he’ll loop it and let it play over and over on repeat. Eventually, he’ll pick up his horn.

The idea to record this album has been with Noah since he was in high school, when his aunt, who taught a film studies class, first screened Anatomy of a Murder for him. It takes nerve for a teenager, listening to Duke Ellington’s jazz score, perhaps the most famous of all time, to say to himself, “I can do that.” But, of course, Noah had a way into the films of Otto Preminger all his own.

Noah was born about one month after Otto Preminger died in 1986. Noah was raised on stories from his grandmother about Otto, a cousin of his grandfather, Jack Preminger. They had grown up together in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (now Chernitsi, Ukraine). To Noah, these giants of the arts, these progenitors of whole classifications of music and film (Film Noir, Swing!), were brought down to earth for him – made corporeal, maybe even people he could relate to.

Then—the films of Otto Preminger kept creeping into Noah’s life. As an undergraduate at New England Conservatory, Noah fell in with the iconoclastic pianist, Ran Blake. Ran also happened to be a film buff and someone deeply connected with the visual and cinematic in his approach to music. Ran even taught a course at NEC that was dedicated to understanding Film Noir in a way that could let it affect a student’s compositional and musical identity. Ran and Noah ended up poring over the scores of Preminger’s films together.

The musicians on this album feel so dialed in. There’s something on this record that feels to me like a collective recital of some foundational American myth. There’s a heaviness to this album. Not a ponderousness, but rather an element that speaks of a second truth behind the music. I may not always see the films of Otto Preminger in the music, but I can feel the weight of narrative that seems to expand these tunes with some inner glow.

We control only a tiny fraction of our own biographies and we continually try to create and shape the stories that come to define us. This record of Noah’s is a singular vision and of course one rooted – like all good improvised music – very much in the moment, but it’s also a collective effort. A joint effort not just of these extraordinary musicians in a Lower East Side Recording studio in 2018, but also a reverberation that stretches from turn-of-the-century Austria through 1950’s Harlem, through a childhood in rural Connecticut and a revelatory screening with a scholarly aunt, and through the halls of New England Conservatory with one of the totemic educators and musicians at the turn of the next century. Sometimes – when the stars really align – we can share stories about where we come from, who we are, and who we want to be, all at the same time. (Elan Mehler)

This album contains no booklet.