• List Price: $11.99  
• Your Price: $11.99
• In Stock: 15

You must login to place orders.




Not purchasing for a business? See our consumer site.

"Heroes, Saints and Clowns" is Ratatet's second album of modern, eclectic jazz featuring compositions by drummer, composer Alan Hall. The music on "Heroes, Saints and Clowns" is inspired by Hall's personal icons and villains. With its audacious frontline of trombone and bassoon, the Bay Area-based sextet Ratatet is no run-of-the-mill jazz ensemble. The adventuresome spirit exemplified by the band's novel instrumentation is also reflected in leader Alan Hall's cliché-free and melody-rich compositions on Arctic, the outfit's genre-dissolving debut recording. Incorporating prime elements of jazz (from mainstream to fusion), funk, rock, South American idioms and classical music, Ratatet categorically rejects rigid categorization. The band, featuring Alan Hall on drums, Paul Hanson on bassoon and tenor saxophone, John Gove on trombone, Dillon Vado on vibraphone, Greg Sankovich on keyboards and Jeff Denson on acoustic and electric bass and vocals, blends sterling musicianship with unbounded creativity, taking full advantage of the inclusive freedom that characterizes the best of new millennium jazz. In addition, Paul McCandless, a member of the famed group, Oregon, is a guest on the album as well as cellist Joseph Hebert. Members of Ratatet have collaborated with such celebrated artists as Lee Konitz, Kenny Werner, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Ralph Alessi, Paul McCandless, Cuong Vu and the Cirque Du Soleil theatrical ensemble.

Track Listing

Sales Points

• Perfect for jazz fans and fans of modern, eclectic jazz

Press Quotes

what sets Ratatet apart...is Hall's finely calibrated compositional sensibility, which balances muscular grooves with multidirectional melodic lines, lush chords and lapidary voicings.

     —Andrew Gilbert, Mercury News

With so many jazz outfits nowadays continually reaching back into the archives to cover standards and rework the catalog, it is refreshing to hear such an adventuresome ensemble as Ratatet.

     —James Nadal, All About Jazz