WITCHI-TAI-TO: THE MUSIC OF JIM PEPPER

Please find below details of my new release which will come out in Europe in March. It is a very prestigious, significant album - a double CD with about 120 minutes of music. Also it is a 6-page digipack with very nice cover art inside and outside and a 24-page booklet as well.

The music is a cross over thing between jazz, Native American Music and classical arrangements by Gunther Schuller - a special event which has never happened before and most of all, it is a rendition of the music of that incredible, incorrigible, lovable, unforgettable anarchist, passionate saxophonist and composer, poet of his people, that Kaw-Creek-American, Jim Pepper, The Flying Eagle, Hunga-Chee-A-Dah.

The recording was made in Cologne with the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra and the Remembrance Band, comprised mainly of musicians Pepper had worked together with personally through many years, under the baton of Gunther Schuller. Native American dancers and singer-percussionists performed also at this event, lending deeper authenticity to this document. This music rises above all expectations, reaching beyond Gunther Schuller’s famous project of the fifties: Third Stream Music. These arrangements construct an astonishing arc, encompassing cohesively Native American chants and rhythms and the structures and tonalities of jazz and modern European classical music. Jim Pepper himself is heard on two titles a ‘Pepper Poem’ and ‘Legacy of the Flying Eagle’ on soprano & vocals!