Three-Part Odyssey

4 1/2 STARS - Remarkably original ... a superb debut.
Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz

Pianist Rich Pellegrin makes his debut as a bandleader with an ensemble comprised of some of the most exciting and forward-looking musicians of Seattle's younger generation: saxophonist Neil Welch, trumpeter R. Scott Morning, bassist Evan Flory-Barnes, and drummer Chris Icasiano. Three-Part Odyssey takes the listener on an epic journey through hypnotic grooves, expansive meditations, stark robotic textures, warm moments of rare beauty, and climactic plateaus of collective improvisation-all culminating in the haunting and deeply affecting final cut, "Maze."

Production Info:

Produced by Rich Pellegrin
Recorded by Vincent LaBelle
at London Bridge Studio, Seattle, WA
July 20 and 21, 2010
Mixed by Vincent LaBelle
at BOOM!, Seattle, WA
Mastered by Mark Guenther at Seattle Disc Mastering, Seattle, WA
Cover art by Julia Hensley
Session photography by Jill Randall Photography
Cover design by John Bishop

Reviews of Three-Part Odyssey

Jazz Society of Oregon (Kyle O'Brien)
Seattle is a place where jazz can be treated as an experiment, and pianist/composer Pellegrin, who is getting his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, takes a studious approach to his music. This is dense jazz from note one. The opener, "Nothing Comes to Mind," is an atonal but rhythmic exploration, with trumpeter R. Scott Morning and saxophonist ...

All Music Guide (Adam Greenberg)
Aiming specifically for a complex, dense sound on his debut album, pianist Rich Pellegrin sets out on Three-Part Odyssey to fill whole sonic landscapes, combining horns with one another for larger sounds and incorporating basslines into thicker underlying grooves. The first "part" comes across heavily, focusing on the lower end of the piano, deep b ...

The Jazz Word (John Barron)
The Rich Pellegrin Quintet explores improvisational freedom within the confines of compositional structures on Three-Part Odyssey, the ensemble's debut for OA2 Records. For this project, Pellegrin, a Seattle-based pianist, took special consideration in choosing band members who could meet specific technical demands while wandering confidently in a ...

Sea of Tranquility (Marc Johnson)
"Pianist Rich Pellegrin makes his debut as a bandleader with an ensemble comprised of some of the most exciting and forward-looking musicians of Seattle's younger generation: saxophonist Neil Welch, trumpeter R. Scott Morning, bassist Evan Flory-Barnes, and drummer Chris Icasiano. Three-Part Odyssey takes the listener on an epic journey through hyp ...

Columbia Daily Tribune (Aarik Danielsen)
Adventure and accessibility, youth and maturity, cool cacophony and brilliant blend. These things need not be at odds, at least not in the hands of the Rich Pellegrin Quintet. Pellegrin, a pianist and visiting assistant professor at the University of Missouri, and his four brothers-in-jazz take listeners on a sojourn through the spaces between seem ...

All About Jazz (Dan McClenaghan)
**** 4 1/2 STARS - What a strange, compelling, often circuitous trip Three-Part Odyssey is. Pianist/composer/bandleader Rich Pellegrin has collected a youthful quintet of Seattle's boldest and most energetic musicians for his debut CD - 73 minutes of audacious grooves inside a set of freewheeling compositions that showcase each band member's indi ...

Audiophile Audition (Doug Simpson)
The Seattle jazz scene is vibrant and open-minded, with artists ranging from Thomas Marriott and Cuong Vu to The Zubatto Syndicate and Jeff Johnson. A new and up-and-coming Seattle jazz musician is the forward-thinking pianist Rich Pellegrin, whose debut release as a leader, Three-Part Odyssey, combines complex and dense structures, cyclical minima ...

Cadence (Alan Bargebuhr)
An "odyssey," indeed. A journey from Seattle to.......where? Not one man's journey, at that, but the collective expedition of five men, all of whom, save for drummer Icasiano, contributed separate TripTiks to the circuitous route. And what's the significance of dividing the so-called odyssey into three parts? I'm sure I dunno, and there appears ...

The Muse's Muse (Dan Cohen)
Rich Pellegrin, with his Three-Part Odyssey, has created a rich, multi-layered and textured work for his first opus on OA2 records out of Seattle, Washington. Texture is used rather glibly in music reviewing circles, but seems deserved on this album. It almost seems an experiment solely in texture-- sacrificing melody, harmony, structure, developme ...

The Jazz Line (Will Schoell)
**** 4-STARS University of Missouri professor of music Rich Pellegrin made his OA2 Records debut this past February, with the album Three Part Odyssey. Finding himself "some of the most exciting and forward looking musicians of Seattle's younger generation" to fill out this quintet, the group echoes the sounds the John Coltrane's great qu ...