The Road to Trantor

For those not in the know, originally from the Philadelphia area, the career of saxophonist Carl Schultz has seen him as a soloist, composer, woodwind specialist, educator, and historian.

Schultz began this journey studying with modern saxophonists such as Ben Schachter and composer Norman David. Their unique approaches to improvisational music blended with the sounds of the Philadelphia jazz scene where Schultz was spending his time listening to great musicians of the music.

His brand new album entitled The Road to Trantor is the soundtrack to a science fiction movie that only exists in his head. When he began composing the music for this album he noticed that, in their earliest phase, the pieces sounded cinematic.

Further more, they seemed to fit certain roles like music for the closing credits of a film or love theme. As each piece progressed, he asked himself what scenes still needed music. What was the plot these pieces fit into? He had been re-reading various Hugo Award winners and turned to his own copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

And whilst he did not want to create a soundtrack to that novel, he pulled in ideas from throughout Asimov's Foundation Universe and applied them to plot devices that would exist in a more standard science fiction or science fantasy narrative.

On an album where the tracks reveal a series of highly creative explorations one after the other, this expansive album of melodically modern jazz opens on the emotive Journey and then we get the pensively sculpted Psychohistory, the impassioned Caves of Steel and the luxuriously crafted Ecumenopolis.

Along next is the veritably ethereal Gladia which is itself backed seamlessly by the spiraling dips and rhythms of Unsettled Worlds, the new set rounding out on the stoically-honed, yet effortlessly driven Crystalline Desolation, coming to a close on the upbeat and enthusiastic The Spirit of Adventure.