Aerial Roots

Deep-sea-diving for the hungry and alone...Aerial Roots, the latest album from C.J. Boyd, contains three songs and clocks in at just under 45 minutes. The notoriously nomadic bass player has been creating his ethereal soundscapes for nearly a decade at this point. Equal parts ambient and virtuosic, CJ Boyd's bass playing builds upon a foundation of great bassists like Charles Mingus and Edgar Meyer. His aesthetic sensibility seeks to wed minimalism with a chamber-esque maximalism. Often flowing from singular, meditative bass lines into explosive, layered, and hugely complex walls of sound, CJ masterfully orchestrates waves of bass loops coupled with Jazz-driven improvisational prowess. Utilizing only various bass instruments and some human-mouth-sounds, creating these lush arrangements is no small feat. Never suffering from the structureless experimentation so prevalent in improvised music, CJ Boyd's vision spawns a record that is quite beautiful...even enlightening.