ANNOUNCING:
Joseph C. Phillip Jr.’s
out August 28
“Phillips’s music flows smoothly and richly…” – The Brooklyn Rail
New Amsterdam Records is proud to announce the forthcoming release of composer Joseph C. Phillips Jr.‘s Changing Same – an hour-long, six-part composition for his 20-piece chamber ensemble Numinous (whose musicians are also members of Asphalt Orchestra, Signal, loadbang, Victoire, Mivos Quartet). The composition, which was conducted by the composer, will be released August 28, 2015 on CD & digitally. Listen to “19“, the first movement of Changing Same, HERE. Joseph and Numinous will also be performing at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge with the Will Mason Ensemble on September 21. Tickets to the event are available HERE.
Changing Same is a conscious acknowledgement of Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s heritage in popular and contemporary music and culture. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes in his essay “The Changing Same“: “R&B is about emotion, issues purely out of emotion. New Black Music is also about emotion, but from a different place, and finally, towards a different end. What these musicians feel is a more complete existence. That is, the digging of everything.”
Inspired by the eponymous essay, Changing Same reflects a post-black aesthetic, described by The Studio Museum in Harlem’s chief curator Thelma Golden as embracing “the dichotomies of high and low, inside and outside, tradition and innovation” within black culture. Through a lens of individual experience, Changing Same explores some of this richness, diversity, and complexity of blackness in America during Phillips’s lifetime — from Angela Davis to the mini series Roots to the inauguration of Barack Obama — while also resonating with a more universal artistic expression (a “digging of everything”) filtered through an intimately autobiographical musical perspective.
Changing Same is the third album from Joseph C. Phillips Jr. and Numinous, whose mixed music has been called “brilliant” (Ted Gioia) “totally riveting” (NewMusicBox), “stylish and provocative” (All Music Guide), “luminous…shimmering” (One Final Note) and praised for inspiring a “sense of wonder” (Audiophile Audition). Changing Same is a palimpsest that builds a new personal statement from the deconstruction and fusion of various layers of artistic and cultural influences into a singular expansive and compelling vision.
Produced by Joseph C. Phillips Jr., Changing Same was engineered and edited by GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Michael Marciano at Systems Two Studios in Brooklyn, mixed by renowned engineer Brian Montgomery, and mastered at New York City’s legendary Sterling Sound by Randy Merrill, with original album artwork created by DM Stith.
Changing Same tracklist:
1. 19
2. Behold The Only Thing Greater Than Yourself
3. Miserere
4. The Most Beautiful Magic
5. Alpha Man
6. Unlimited
9/21 – Le Poisson Rouge – New York, NY #
# – w/Will Mason Ensemble
