Jazzy Fusion | Alan Goldberg: CreateBecome (Independent / March 10, 2025)

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Jazzy Fusion
Alan Goldberg: CreateBecome
(Independent / March 10, 2025)

"'CreateBecome' is a forty-year-old mantra I use, and the title of my fifth album. Repeating CreateBecome over and over is a focus that I use to be purely In the moment. It's also a perfect title for the eleven songs on this album. The songs are linked together by what I've learned in my life, through paying attention, making choices, and changing, hopefully growing." 

Album cover for Alan Goldberg's CreateBecome, a drawing of a small figure emerging from a door into a room full of large works of art

Austin-based musician and composer Alan Goldberg has been making music for more than two decades. The instrumental tracks have an easy kind of vibe, jazzy in their harmonic and rhythmic complexity, but with a pop songwriter's sense of melody that emerges from the mix. Though there is no vocalist, you could easily imagine it on tracks like Unbroken Chain and Essential Innocence.

Createbecome, the title track, is the album's longest, and more abstract in its approach to melody. Here, the drums lay out a slower, steady rhythm, and Goldberg's piano, with a brass chorus, moves up and down it. Organ and guitar make brief appearances to add colour to the dense track.

Tracks like Questions Like Blue Sky and Foolish Heart approach the parameters of traditional jazz with what I can only describe as a big sensibility. Alan has a penchant for musical statements on a big scale - all the instruments firing on all cylinders by the end, with virtuosic piano lines tripping above it all.

Musician Alan Goldberg wears a black t-shirt and tall black Western hat

Through It All (Reprise) and I Don't Know Why are outliers, solo piano pieces in a melodic neoclassical mode. In Grow Entangled, you can hear the influence of arena rock in its anthemic style.

Goldberg says he often improvises during the initial recording, essentially capturing that spirit live to then add the ensemble instruments around it.

It seems there are other methods he uses to spark inspiration.

"My technique works well with video. I watch. I play in real time, and then I discover the piece.  It can work well when I’m watching something that directs passion in a particular way. Everything can spark an inspiration. "

Personnel: Keyboards - Alan Goldberg, Drums - Jake Naugle, Guitar - Marcus Goldberg, Trumpet- Mark Morgan, Sebastián Greschuk, Sax - Jeff Miguel, Jerry Branting, Jack Parry, Trombone - Tito Planas

Tracklist: 1.  Unbroken Chain; 2. Essential Innocence; 3. CreateBecome (I. Receive II. Infuse III.Release); 4. Chance Choice Change; 5. Questions Like Blue Sky; 6. Foolish Heart; 7. On The Trail; 8. Through It All (Reprise); 9. Grow Entangled; 10. Wave Function Collapse; 11. I Don't Know Why

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