Our latest record Galore is available at the Downtown Music Gallery(NYC) and at Skirl Records .We're also distributed by Carrot Top , (as well as North Country) and in Europe by Adlib .
Time Out NY by Hank Shteamer
Jazz is name-brand music, literally. Whereas rock bands typically choose creative monikers, jazz ensembles are frequently titled after who’s in charge. In the local quartet Human Feel, no one’s in charge—or rather, everyone is. Reedists Andrew D’Angelo and Chris Speed, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and drummer Jim Black share compositional duties, and since the band last recorded in 1996, each has established himself as a bandleader and progressive-jazz luminary. Burgeoning solo careers certainly had something to do with Human Feel’s hiatus, but a collective is rarely easy to keep together. No clear-cut leader means that nobody can assume the just-show-up-and-play mentality of a sideman.
Like the quartet’s back catalog, Galore is slack-free, yet not always rigorous. If the instrumentation screams jazz, the music represents a boundless contemporary aesthetic, encompassing airy melody, breakbeat-inspired groove, fluttering minimalism and prog-rock stomp without resorting to simplistic allusion. The ballad “Allegiance†features the kind of wistful trudge that any indie-rock fan would recognize immediately; pieces like this and the sleek, headlong “Fuss†deftly refute the self-conscious artiness normally ascribed to songs without vocals. At the same time, tunes such as “Improve†deliver plenty of the avant-garde skronk so integral to Human Feel’s early work. Given the band’s brilliant past, the collective alchemy of Galore isn’t exactly a surprise, but it is a treat to hear these four functioning at full strength after a decade’s silence.
NEW YORK TIMES by Nate Chinen
During the first half of the 1990's, the ensemble known as Human Feel was several things at once: a workshop for unruly improvisational tactics, a self-styled alternative to neo-conservatism, and a delivery system for some of the era's most unclassifiable new talent. Its founding core consisted of the multireedists Chris Speed and Andrew D'Angelo and the drummer Jim Black, a trio of Seattle natives transplanted via music school to Boston, where they shared an apartment as well as an aesthetic. Various others floated in and out of the group before the arrival of the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, which proved definitive. As a bass-less quartet, Human Feel strained toward the ragged-edge postmodernism established by a previous generation of downtown avatars like John Zorn and Tim Berne, but with an emotional directness more closely derived from underground rock. It was energy music, plugged into the spirit of the age. Arriving in New York, the band's members were quickly absorbed into one scene or another: Mr. Speed and Mr. Black became one half of Mr. Berne's raucous Bloodcount, Mr. D'Angelo dug in with the drummer Matt Wilson, and Mr. Rosenwinkel became a mainstay at Smalls. The musicians have hardly been strangers since, but the last proper Human Feel album, "Speak to It" (Songlines), was released in 1996. This reunion — the first in years — comes amid reports of a new recording. And it offers a good measure of the ways in which the musicians, separately and in collaboration, have exceeded their early promise.
