Underdog
Released Mar 10 2023
Redline Trio’s cohesiveness and musicianship is immediately evident on your first listening. Their musical concept is unabashedly straight ahead with repertoire that favours the traditional head-solos-head format. Each musician has contributed their own compositions to this recording, and the album is filled with fresh new sounds. Redline Trio is composed of Calgarians Jeff Sulima on drums, Steve Shepard on bass, and Mark DeJong on tenor saxophone. On this date, they’re joined by Vancouver’s titanic talent Brad Turner on trumpet and New York’s Steve Hudson on piano.
They have also burnished their group’s sound in a way that’s not very common anymore: for the past six years, they’ve been playing together every week at a Calgary venue called Betty Lou’s Library. With several Western Canadian tours with Turner and with Hudson under their belts they headed into the award-winning OCL Studios in Chestermere, Alberta.
A note on the recording itself: The session was tracked by Josh Rob Gwilliam at OCL and then mixed and mastered by the group’s trumpeter Brad Turner, who is himself a highly gifted recording engineer and record producer. The sound quality of this final product is beautiful: each instrument’s tone is clear and warm, the balance between the instruments is perfect, and the musicians all sound as though they’re playing in the same room together. If, like me, you treat yourself to listening to this album with headphones on, you will appreciate the recording quality even more.
Tracks