Ben Goldberg - clarinets; Todd Sickafoose - acoustic bass; Scott Amendola - drums / electronics

Ben Goldberg, Todd Sickafoose and Scott Amendola celebrate the release of their new album, HERE TO THERE, with a set of mysterious, fluid music occasionally inspired by the bridges of Thelonious Monk compositions. As a trio they have 30 years of shared history.

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The clarinet trio is an unusual instrumentation for most. For Ben Goldberg? “It's been the most common trio in my life,” says the master clarinetist.

With Here To There, three longtime musical comrades join forces in a together-again-for-the-first time collective for the newest iteration of clarinet trio excellence. Goldberg, explorative double bassist Todd Sickafoose and inventive drummer Scott Amendola perform eleven originals by all three members, channeling the sound of deep friendship, creative freedom and time-earned ease.

“Plays Monk,” a longtime group with bassist Devra Hoff, “had a nice run, and Scott and I were thinking it would be fun to play in a trio some more,” said Goldberg, in a three-way Zoom video interview. “So we recruited Todd. We've all played together in different combinations over the last 30 years and are all friends. We're also on similar wavelengths, musically.”

Amendola set up a series of concerts over two weekends in 2022, and the new trio pondered its musical approach. “We knew we didn't exactly want to just keep playing Monk, but weren’t sure what else to do,” said Sickafoose. “So the idea appeared in the middle of one of our gigs. I feel like it was you, Ben, who said we should just play the bridges.”

“And that somehow turned into the idea of writing some tunes that were all based on the bridge of a Thelonious Monk song,” Goldberg continued. “That's where we opened the door to this thing that feels like a real group sound, like our own sound.”

Sickafoose’s compositions all grew out of Monk: “In Walked” was inspired by the bridge for “In Walked Bud,” while “Interospection” was drawn from “Introspection.” Others take Monk’s unique titles—and bridges—and further twists them—”Evidence” begat “Self Evident,” and “Epistrophy” was the seed for “Sad Trophy.” “‘Self Evident’ was the one that really crystallized something about this project because of that beautiful bridge on ‘Evidence’ that just goes up by half steps,” Goldberg said. “So the idea becomes, ‘What if this just keeps unraveling?’ It’s the intersection between Monk and MC Escher,” Sickafoose further explained.

“A bridge is a funny idea, because sometimes what it is is the palette cleanser,” he went on to say. “And Monk was especially like that. He often creates these aerobic A sections. And then a bridge that's built on the tiniest kernel of an idea that gets extrapolated.”

While Sickafoose’s originals used Monk bridges as jumping off points, Amendola’s and Goldberg’s took a more general inspiration from the master. Amendola wrote a series of compositions (“Lions Heart,” Lions Heart 2” and “Lions Heart 3”) that capture the seemingly telepathic interplay between the three with a pair of vignettes and third piece that’s alternately melancholy and fervent.

In addition to the elegant and mesmerizing title track, Goldberg also wrote a series of pieces titled “Porch Concert Material” and presented three to record. “I was thinking about the idea of a bridge as something that takes you from here to there,” he reflected. “‘Can I write a song that specifically gets us from here to there and then maybe starts over again?’” Sickafoose and Amendola help guide “Porch Concert Material 9,” “Porch Concert Material 2” and “Porch Concert Material 6” with easy skill and an unhurried urgency.

Though the project was born out of live performances, the trio considers the recording its own separate entity. Captured at Gung-Ho Studio in Oregon, it reflects the easy rapport of three musicians who have known one another and played together for a quarter of a century.

“For me, part of it was the setting. We recorded it near Todd's house in Eugene at a wonderful studio run by a friend called Billy Barnett,” Goldberg said. “There's something about being with an engineer that you trust in a room that feels good in a setting that's beautiful that really helps you let loose and focus on what's important about creating art.”

“You’re feeling a connection, and you're having a great time,” Amendola agreed. “You just feel like there's no end in sight.”

“I just feel like when you find the people that are for you, find the people who you can work and make progress and develop a sound with, then you keep playing with those people,” Goldberg stated. “And there's no substitute for all that shared history,” Sickafoose concluded.

Scott Amendola is an ambitious composer, savvy bandleader and capaciously creative foil for some of the world’s most inventive musicians, Amendola applies his wide-ranging rhythmic virtuosity to a vast array of settings. Clarinetist and composer Ben Goldberg’s music “conveys a feeling of joyous research into the basics of polyphony and collective improvising, the constant usefulness of musicians intuitively coming together and pulling apart.” (New York Times) Todd Sickafoose is a Tony & Grammy award-winning composer, producer, orchestrator, bandleader and double bassist whose music straddles the worlds of folk, indie rock, jazz and chamber music.