Fermentations is the debut album from Buffalo-based experimental music project, Root Cellar.
The chamber quintet formed in 2017, bringing together a diverse group of musicians with backgrounds in jazz, rock, classical, and the avant garde. The juxtaposition and cohesion of these styles can be heard in both the ensemble’s original compositions and their exploratory improvisations: angular hard bop figurations which melt into hypnotically motorik grooves, poignant post-rock textures erupting into cacophonous free jazz convulsions; and cannily polished ensemble arrangements flowering into atmospheric spaces, always emphasizing each player’s idiosyncratic improvisational voices.
All this and more can be heard on Fermentations, the band’s recorded debut. Captured live in 2023 and 2024 at Revolution Gallery in their hometown of Buffalo, the album is an odyssey through the band’s heterogenous creative practice. On “Blackwell,” an affecting main theme is transformed as it kinetically winds through the quintet’s instrumentation of trumpet, cello, guitar, bass and drums. Mysterious Residents-esque improv, “Garlic Bread Problems,” coalesces into “Simple Suite,” a lush ambient environment structured around rhapsodic melodies. On closer “Bookhouse,” muscular pentatonic guitar riffs alternate with quirky brass interjections before the band locks into a Tortoise-esque groove, a journey unto itself that eventually brings the album to its animated conclusion.
For complete credits and liner notes, download the Fermentations booklet.
Praise for Fermentations
“The thoughtfulness and intention behind each each of the varied textures on this album make Fermentations a rewarding and engrossing listen, start to finish. This tight-knit quintet pulses as one over grooves in “Wet Heel”, “Blackwell”, and “Bookhouse” through the rhythmic twists and turns of “Unexpected Rough Air”, and in the ostensibly “free” passages in “Garlic Bread Problems” and throughout. This band has been refining their craft and approach over years, and in this new album we can all enjoy the fruits of what they’ve been fermenting.”
—Michael McNeill, pianist & composer