Jentsch Group Large - Cycles Suite
Jazz Inside New York
October 2009
by Matt Marshall


Cycling through experimental squeaks, rumbles, scratches and open space into choreographed passages of group melody, guitarist Chris Jentsch’s Cycles Suite plays out over new fields of exploratory soling that twine with an ever-renewing group dynamic. Often it’s like a dream from which you can’t emerge, where “waking” is simply an entry into another room of the dream. As in life (which the suite is meant to represent), Jentsch’s piece offers space for individualist statements, but never allows them to overtake the whole. His emphasis on a collective, interrelated existence, forces his group’s music to rise from a spontaneity that nevertheless seems rooted in fate.