Found in Space: The Music of Gregg Hill is the seventh album to be released featuring the music of 78-year-old Michigan composer Gregg Hill, and it's Michael Dease's second Hill project. "Something I really dig about Gregg's writing is that his melodies are direct," says Dease in the liner notes, "they're unpretentious to me and they balance lyricism with a mathematical sense of logic. That's where you get these cellular bits that repeat, that have elements of riff music that could be from the territory band era." Here Dease has been inspired to significantly and uniquely expand the ensemble he led on his earlier Hill album (The Other Shoe: The Music of Gregg Hill) with a reeds/winds section including clarinet (Virginia MacDonald) and flute (Sharel Cassity), as well as alto saxophone (Rudresh Mahanthappa) and tenor saxophone (Jason Hainsworth). There's also trumpet (Matt White), trombone (Nanami Haruta) plus the leader on either trombone or baritone saxophone. The rhythm section has Bill Cunliffe (piano, Fender Rhodes), Katie Thiroux (bass), Colleen Clark (drums) and Gwendolyn Dease (marimba, percussion). Of note: 6 of the 11 musicians are women.
Hill's music features shifting rhythms, time signatures and tempi, all often within one piece, as on the opener, "The Lost Pop Tune", which incorporates an intro from The Twilight Zone before it moves from 5/4 to 6/4 to 5/4 to 3/4, before settling on 4/4 behind the solos. Dease is also fond of contrapuntal section lines, pitting reeds against brass or combinations of both against each other, as on the title track, also notable for impressive solos from Dease's baritone and White's trumpet. The wealth of fine, incisive solos proves to be the album's other stellar accomplishment. For while honoring the sometimes-quirky contours and paths of Hill's pieces, the arrangers also leave plenty of space for arresting solos. Dease even shares trombone solo space on the flute-led melody of "The Stray Moonduck", with
fellow trombonist Haruta. All of the band members solo on the concluding track, "A Wrinkle in Time", before the leader takes it out with his most impressive Found in Space trombone solo.