(portaltaxi.net/music) – Offbeat Jazz musician’s first effort is an avant-garde, genre-bending masterpiece
Michael Rick Fendel comes from a musical family. His brother, George Fendel, is an accomplished jazz pianist, concert producer, and radio personality for Oregon’s KMHD 89.1 jazz radio station. He’s also part of a long list of artists that have influenced his brother, Michael Rick Fendel.
Michael Rick Fendel is an alto saxophonist and pianist with a lifelong love for jazz, and all music. His debut album, “Turn It Around” is Fendel’s first attempt to capture his love of writing and performing music, so it can be shared with everyone.
“Turn It Around” isn’t your grandfather’s jazz album. While he certainly has the chops to hold his own in a traditional jazz club, Michael Rick Fendel takes all that stultifying, hidebound reverence, and gleefully turns it on its ear. That joyful sense of making music for its own sake infuses every track on “Turn It Around.”
“This spirited album is about love, healing and change. If the music here has colors they’re all in there, but mostly they’re blue and green,” Fendel says.
Just as he experiments with genre conventions, Michael Rick Fendel is willing to challenge social mores too.
“In a light-hearted way, this CD shares a message of unity, cooperation and the realization of personal and planetary change, resulting in universal health care, ecological repair, justice, and peace,” he says.
Some of the material on “Turn It Around” is highly topical, and unabashedly opinionated. The first track, “We’re the 99 Percent and So Are You” is a lighthearted political missive, delivered with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that crosses political lines with a message of unity. “Macho’s Lament” is a satirical rebuke of American stereotypes. “Love of Our Hearts” is an earnest plea for social change and the realization of human potential. The rest of the tracks on “Turn It Around” are just as loading with meaning and energy, and delivers with Fendel’s trademark sense of humor and wit.
Musically, “Turn It Around” blends avant-garde jazz with latin, country, blues, and pop elements in unusual and surprising combinations that somehow always remain accessible, despite their originality.
– L. Cutler
Staff Press Release Writer
MondoTunes
The LP “Turn It Around” is distributed globally by MondoTunes (www.MondoTunes.com) and is available at iTunes for convenient purchase and download
MondoTunes (www.mondotunes.com) supplies the largest music distribution in the world and provides upstream services for many major labels in search of breakout artists. While most independent distributors reach only 45-50 retailers despite charging needless monthly and yearly fees, MondoTunes reaches over 750 retailers and mobile partners in over 100 world regions without any monthly or yearly fees.
ARTIST CONTACT INFO:
ADDRESS – 858 NE 113th Ave., Portland, OR 97220
EMAIL – heyfen@yahoo.com
WEBSITE – michaelrickfendel.com
