Ralph Alessi Quartet with craig taborn, drew gress, billy drummond

Ralph Alessi brings his quartet to The Pocket with Craig Taborn on piano, Drew Gress on bass, and Billy Drummond on drums. The trumpeter and composer leads the four musicians through his own pieces, a setting built around composition and spontaneous interplay. The listing describes an approach centered on interaction, openness, and the unexpected, with four established creative-jazz voices working through Alessi’s material together.

Alessi grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a trumpet player and composer who divides his time between Brooklyn and Bern. An ECM recording artist, he is known for exploratory original music that joins lyrical clarity to rhythmic complexity. He has played and recorded with Fred Hersch, Steve Coleman, Ravi Coltrane, Jason Moran, Sam Rivers, Tim Berne, and Uri Caine. ECM calls his writing “idiosyncratically swinging”; DownBeat has praised his “unique tone” and a balance of “beauty with friction.” The Guardian called him “an individualist, with a style and sound all his own,” noting his “flawless technique” and his way of drawing on jazz tradition “while avoiding its clichés.”