By Ed Enright | Published June 2025
When you live, work and play in New York, the city’s renowned culture is there for the taking. But even if your day-to-day pursuits are of the utmost sophistication, there’s no escaping the raw grit and inherent riskiness of urban life. Nobody knows that better than Michael Dease, who spent more than a decade of his formative years in the Big Apple, and whose latest double album, City Life, bustles like Seventh Avenue at rush hour and soars as high as the Empire State building. It’s the third recording project on which Dease has collaborated with the prolific composer Gregg Hill, who succeeds in bringing out a more adventurous side of the versatile trombonist, known among listeners as a torchbearer for the jazz tradition. Both of the wide-ranging albums that constitute City Life feature Dease with a rhythm section of bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. They perform as a trio for the entirety of Disc 1, with the leader’s daughter, the vital tenor saxophonist Brooklyn Dease, contributing vocals on two tracks. The core trio expands into a quintet on Disc 2 as Dease welcomes pianist Geoffrey Keezer and tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover into the bustling fray, with bassist Jared Beckstead-Craan, Dease’s former student, taking Oh’s place on two tracks. City Life’s two sets revolve around 12 new pieces by Hill, as well as a pair by Dease (who recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Music Composition), two lesser-known works from the vast oeuvre of bebop-’bone icon J.J. Johnson, one by the late guitarist Emily Remler, one by saxophonist Greg Tardy and one by saxophonist Sharel Cassity. Sporting such edgy titles as “Danger Zone,” “Say Whaaat?” and “Mr. Hurt,” and evoking images of the quieter, more refined aspects of urban living in polished gems like “Tea Time” and “Rainy Afternoon,” this wide-ranging collection of mostly original music vibrantly captures the kaleidoscopic colors and multifarious flavors of life in the big city.
