Musicians Featured:

• Kris Tiner - Trumpet

• Mike Baggetta - guitar

Cover Artwork

• Cover Photograph by Elisha Schlarb

• Layout by David J. Woodruff

Press: “This is music for quiet indoor moments, when the weather is cold and unfriendly outside, and all you need is to be enveloped by warm and gentle quality music, as an extra to the blanket and the hearth. “ — Free Jazz Blog

Liner Notes by Jerry David DeCicca:

It's a bad habit, but one of my favorite things to do is eavesdrop.
The whereabouts of this activity doesn't matter much to me. It could be anywhere- a bar, a park, a coffee shop, somewhere I'm not supposed to be. When I walk into a restaurant, and allowed to seat myself, I pick a table close to others. I steer away from families, groups of co-workers, nothing with a rumbling collective energy. I position myself nearer the intimacy of the one-on-one dialogues, where two people confide, and I suppose that's what makes me, as I've been told, a bit of a creeper.
I value the same leanness in my personal interactions. I rarely go to parties or large gatherings. Too much noise and commotion for me. I like the emptiness between burps of language and the intensity of minimal companionship. Not just the meatiness that these moments reveal, but the sounds that can be heard when words and rooms and bodies extend and decay and overlap one another.
So, as a record listener, I prefer minimalism for similar reasons and, when listening to Evening Hawks, I hear Kris Tiner and Mike Baggetta communicating in this manner. They listen and interrupt; they confess and gossip, complain and plead, beg and condole, giggle and cry. On "Morning Hawks" near the album's midpoint, they sound groggy, like they are still waking up or already exhausted by one another. And two tunes later, on the title track, they bid goodnight; their notes lingering and elongating a goodbye, like my dead Italian grandpa.
There are two songs here that Tiner and Baggetta did not write. The first is Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong". I suppose it may appear half empty to attempt Cohen without words, but I've long argued that Cohen's secret strength is actually the way his voice activates and cracks-open his melodies; the words, however great, are not the engine. Tiner and Baggetta slow this song down to a dirge, stretching the emotional elasticity of Cohen's tune without the written words. This version feels both sad and violent, final and unresolved, like a Sam Shepard play. The other borrowed composition is an old country song called "Let Me Talk to You," which feels more loving than the genre's usual achiness. Tiner/Baggetta learned it from Willie Nelson, but their version feels more aligned with an earlier rendition inhabited by Ray Price, more crooned than spoken, where the middle section of phrases arc and curl.
This is an album that manages to capture chunks of time without acknowledging its passing - the way Baggetta's amp crackles and hums, the way Tiner's lips seem to breathe for him through his horn. There's no distinction between the composition and the humanness of who they are to one another. It reminds me of records like Ali Farka Touré & Ry Cooder's Talking Timbuktu and Max Roach & Anthony Braxton's One in Two-Two in One, not by way of instrumentation, but in spirit. Evening Hawks is that rare bird that asks the mind and body to "sit still!" so you can enjoy two strangers as they know each other in plain sight.