This genre bending duo explodes brass playing to another dimension. Firmly rooted in the Jazz tradition, these two innovative stylists push the possibilities of the music forward into the 21st century.
Product of a 30 year musical friendship, the Duo weaves blues, jazz, folk songs, spirituals and originals into a wondrous tapestry. \"Funky as they want to be\" and \"occasionally sounding like an entire brass band,\" Stewart and Anderson cover the entire history of the music, from earliest parade ground marches to latest sonic sculptures.
\"The two synchronized their prodigious talents on \'East St. Louis Toodle-oo\', \'Wade In the Water\', \'John Henry\' and even The Four Tops\' \'I Can\'t Help Myself\', retelling every tale in ebullient and hauntingly personal fashion.\"
David Adler, All About Jazz, NY.
Trombonist Ray Anderson and tubaman Bob Stewart call themselves a Heavy Metal Duo, but this refers to the literal weight of their hefted horns, rather than a songbook of Ted Nugent and The Tygers Of Pan Tang. It's not often we'll see such a brass teaming, with no other players in range. These pair eschew the use of samplers and effects pedals: their broad sonic scope is a result of a purely buzz-lipped vocabulary, massive lung capacity and a general staccato-tonguing stamina. They might even be jazz traditionalists, down at their core. Much of the set-list is made up from old Duke Ellington-ish numbers like Blood Count and East St. Louis Toodle-Ooo, but the twosome also contribute several of their own modernising pieces. Either way, the language is a mix of bluesy jazz huffing and disembodied splutter techniques, as one player (usually Stewart) sets up a grumbling riff, and the other (usually Anderson) takes flight with nary a pause for breath. There is great comic potential with these two horns, which Anderson and Stewart fully milk, but they're also here to impress with their complete technical mastery, so the audience are forced to alternate broad smiles with hanging jaws.
The mark of a great artist has always been to go beyond technical excellence and impart a personal vision - a sense of style and self-expression that is indelibly his own. Among modern jazz musicians, no one rises to that standard more than trombonist Ray Anderson, whose sublime mastery of the tricks of his trade is equaled by the bountiful spirit he pours into his one-of-a kind sound. The man who wrote If I Ever Had a Home It Was a Slide Trombone, one of his many original compositions, has inhabited every nook and cranny of his horn. Described by critic Gary Giddins as \"one of the most compellingly original trombonists,\" he is by turns a supremely lyrical player and bold texturalist, a warmly natural-sounding soloist and footloose innovator. Broadening the trombone\'s sonic scope with his extended techniques, brilliantly unconventional use of the plunger mute and demonstrative vocal-like tones, he played a major role in reawakening interest in the instrument in the \'80s.
Bob has toured and recorded with such artists as Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Carla Bley, David Murray, Taj Mahal, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Arthur Blythe, Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Nicholas Payton, Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Lester Bowie and many others both in the United States, Europe and the Far East. \"The Tuba, as you know, was phased out of most ensembles around 1923 with the introduction of the \"walking\" upright bass. Since then it has only been in the last 20 years that composers and arrangers have begun hearing the instrument. As a result, there are more instances in which the Tuba appears in ensemble work.\" Bob Stewart is bridging the gap between 1923 and the present by bringing the Tuba back into the modern ensemble as the bass in the rhythm section and as a horn available for melodic lines and soloing.