A Light Shining Through

The origin story of this recording is sweet and slightly heartbreaking. David Friesen's mother is from Ukraine, and after a long career as a boundary-pushing bassist and composer he was finally able to visit that country on tour in 2015. There he had the opportunity to perform and record with the National Academic Symphonic Band, and later recorded these sessions with the Kyiv Mozart String Quartet. That was in 2021, and the combination of war and a global pandemic put the brakes on additional collaborations and performances. But the recordings he made with them (along with saxophonist Joe Manis and percussionists Alex Fantaev and Charlie Doggett) are now made available in this package. Longtime Friesen fans will be unsurprised by the fact that this music is jazz-adjacent but not really like anything you're likely to have heard before: there's more than a hint of Fourth World experimentalism on tracks like "Blue and Red" and "Islands," while the compositions that incorporate the string quartet explore a sort of Third Stream territory that sounds nothing like old-school Third Stream classical-jazz fusion. Very cool stuff overall.