Streaming This Week: Ari Hoenig's 'Lines of Oppression'

Anthony Dean-Harris
Editor-in-Chief
anthony.deanharris[at]nextbop.com / @retronius

[Listen to Ari Hoenig in the Nextplayer]

Ari Hoenig is versatile. The Philadelphia native has played jazz standards, Pink Floyd covers, and his own compositions with equal aplomb, and justifiably so. This year, Hoenig’s drumming has managed to stand out on two major albums: Threedom with Jean-Michel Pilc and François Moutin and his own Naïve Records release, Lines of Oppression. In both albums, Hoenig makes his distinct voice heard playing original compositions and jazz standards. Both albums manage to put deconstruction on a whole new level with masterful arrangements. However, Hoenig’s Lines of Oppression allows Hoenig to showcase his talents more. While the collaborative factor is clearly important in the jazz form (especially in piano/bass/drum trio of the Pilc/Moutin/Hoenig longstanding trio), Hoenig’s arrangements on Lines of Oppression allow for some spectacular drumming to shine through in unforeseen ways like in "Rythm" alongside Tigran Hamasyan's beatboxing, the intro to an equally impressive version of “Rhythm-a-ning”, or when crafting the perfect tableau of shifting tones and falling action in a sort of clunking time in the intensely powerful closer “Higher to Hayastan”. The man’s got skills and his group of the aforementioned Tigran Hamasyan on piano, Gilad Hekselman on guitar, and Orlando Le Fleming and Chris Tordini switching off on bass have equivalently impressive skills to put an album like this together. This is a pretty cool album that actually released earlier this year, but we feel that you should really give it a listen this week so something this good doesn’t pass you by.