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Beingness on CD

Beingness brings together three masters of creative music: award-winning percussionist Adam Rudolph, soprano sax player and NEA Jazz Master Dave Liebman, and drummer and NEA Jazz Master Billy Hart.Available May 23, 2025 via Rudolph's Meta Records, the live album, recorded in the spring of 2023 at New York City's iconic creative music venue The Stone, marks the fourth in a series of trio recordings released by Liebman and Rudolph.

The trio's genesis evolved naturally. Hart and Liebman, who met performing on Miles Davis' historic 1972 recording On the Corner, have played together for over 30 years in configurations including their Quest quartet. Liebman and Rudolph began playing as a duo in 2016, developing a trio with rotating drum chairs. "When we found out Tyshawn (Sorey) was unavailable for The Stone concert, Dave suggested we ask Billy Hart, " remembers Rudolph. "I enthusiastically agreed. I've admired Billy's playing since I first heard him with Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi Sextet at the Smiling Dog in Cleveland. I loved his playing then and I love it now." Working with Liebman and Hart was a dream come true for Rudolph. "Both Billy and Dave inspired me so much when I was a teenager first getting into playing music, " he said. "It was a real honor to create the spontaneous compositions on Beingness with these two masters."

Together, Hart, Liebman and Rudolph bring decades of performance experience in the full range of contemporary jazz and creative improvised music. Their embodied experience of playing these forms allows them to spontaneously generate new forms though melodic and rhythmic dialogues. These factors, along with the unique combination of instruments Liebman's wood flutes and Rudolph's array of percussion bring to the trio, make Beingness a completely original and soulful addition to the evolution of creative music. Liebman, Hart and Rudolph channel their unique and evolved rhythm and sonic languages through inspired, spirited musical dialogue. The result is music that exists on it's own terms, reflecting the wonderful alchemy of the artists as they spontaneously create dialogues, orchestrations, and sonic moods. "The three of us were committed to open our ears and hearts, " says Liebman. "The results were magical."

Hart concurs: "You have to come to a creative situation like this with open ears, an open heart, and freeflowing imagination. The preparation is also years of practice, composing and performance so that we can be free to play anything we can imagine to play." For the live performance, Rudolph employed his "organic" orchestrations and electronic processing. He recalls, "Dave was so inspired by the electronic processing I did during the concert that he asked me to do more of it post production." Rudolph spent hours diving deep into the music to subtly expand the orchestral palate and create a shadow world of harmonic colors. While maintaining awareness of the precedent of post-production processes in classic recordings like BitchesBrew and Weather Report, Rudolph incorporated additional ideas from his world music experience: "My primary inspiration for the electronic orchestrations is the ancient African practice of complexifying the sound of instruments, for example by attaching rattles or putting gut strings on skins, so that when they're played, a parallel 'shadow line" of sound is heard. These rhythm overtones are sometimes called 'the voice of the ancestors' and add a transcendent quality to the music."

As Rudolph reflects in the liner notes "Beingness is the source of inspiration which moves silence towards it's manifestation as form in sound. Each gesture animates in the infinite space between thought and non-thought awareness. The fluidity of spontaneous sonic projections reflect the essential being of nature, which is change."