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Noah Preminger's Before the Rain
The tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger is just 24, but already he has a distinctive sound: a confident, husky tone, combined with fleet, sometimes fragmentary phrasings: something like Sonny Rollins channeling Leo Konitz.
It's an unlikely mix of homages, but with an equally surefooted and agile band, it works. And on Preminger's latest album, Before the Rain (on the Palmetto label), his bandpianist Frank Kimbrough, bassist John Herbst, and drummer Matt Wilsonis all that.
The disc consists mainly of slow ballads, some originals, some standards, simmered in polyrhythms, cool in demeanor but ripe with emotion. There are also some jagged upbeat tunes, where all the playersand this is more a true quartet than a leader-with-three-backupsstep out with a controlled abandon.
The sound quality is good, though I wish the drums were a little less compressed.
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