CDs, MP3s, Sheet Music, and lossless audio files available at my Store. Autographed copies by request. Also available at Bandcamp and on Apple Music.
“simply astonishing from one song to the next” - JazzdaGama
Here is the second album by Secret Keeper and the fulfillment of a promise that began with our first sessions, those which yielded the Super Eight. During the period of making that first recording, Mary and I were inspired to each compose pieces specifically for the duo. We then worked out those compositions during our rehearsals and subsequent touring after Super Eight‘s release. In contrast to that first album’s spontaneously generated works, Emerge features four compositions from each of us, plus our own view of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do,” which was recorded during a summer rainstorm. Mary and I both feel this recording offers not only a different angle on the duo’s work, but a good view into our deepening rapport.
Secret Keeper
MARY HALVORSON · guitar
STEPHAN CRUMP · acoustic bass
“These are, in sum, sincere and poised accounts, fitting tributes to the exciting and faultless character of composers and their music.”
Jazz da Gama
“Such loose but precise music is difficult to execute well and the fact that the compositions are also uniformly excellent simply adds to the disc’s overall effect”
NYC Jazz Record
“guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Stephan Crump have perfected the art of inhabiting different worlds simultaneously”
NYC Jazz Record
“laudable balance of chamber-like precision and freewheeling intimacy”
The New York Times
“the tinkling timbral icicles that coalesce at end of ‘Erie’ touch on the sublime”
Dusted in Exile
“The tunes burrow deeper into my memory with each pass, but it’s the way Halvorson and Crump dance together in those melodies that really knocks me out”
Chicago Reader