Drew Gress

Heyday is the first album bassist Drew Gress made as a leader, with his quartet Jagged Sky: alto saxophonist David Binney, guitarist Ben Monder and drummer Kenny Wollesen. It was recorded on 4 and 5 August 1997 at Sound On Sound Recording in New York and released by Soul Note in September 1998. Nine of the eleven pieces are by Gress. The other two are numbers 125 and 132 from Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos, placed first and sixth in a programme whose tracks run from under a minute to almost a quarter of an hour. The booklet dedicates the record to his father, Andy.

Gress produced the album with Tim Berne, in whose band Paraphrase he played, as he did in the trio of Fred Hersch. Jon Rosenberg engineered and mixed it in September 1997, and Kevin Whitehead wrote the liner notes. The long pieces carry most of the weight: One-Man Mexico City at more than ten minutes, Beeline / Back In The Cage at nine, and the closing Devil In The Details at over fourteen. Clear Through lasts fifty seconds and Andrew John under two and a half minutes. Glenn Astarita, writing in All About Jazz in October 1998, singled out the difficult unison runs of Monder and Binney and called the writing "probing and for the most part exhilarating". Ed Hazell gave the album three and a half stars in The Worcester Phoenix that December. He heard arrangements that let the bass take the lead and the alto play a supporting role, with the group "setting up grooves and deconstructing them", and praised Wollesen as an especially melodic drummer, at home in free pulse or swing.

This is the original Soul Note CD 121314-2 from 1998, issued in a jewel case with a twelve-page booklet.