We are proud to share our debut album, Aero Quartet, which is a culmination of our musical journey as an ensemble to date. In our time together, we have found joy and inspiration from playing music of all styles. When creating this record, our goal was to highlight a taste of the music we love while demonstrating the versatility of the saxophone quartet. We conceived a track list that flows between classical and jazz music, interspersed with elements of music from around the globe.
Western-classical music represents the core of our activity as an ensemble. Representing this on the album are Alexander Glazunov’s Quatuor and Carlos Simon’s Elegy. Glazunov’s composition is a magnum opus for the saxophone quartet. He elegantly showcases the beauty of the instrument by utilizing many classical forms and referencing the many great composers of his time. Elegy poignantly responds to tragedies of injustice and cruelty inflicted upon marginalized peoples. We feel Carlos Simon’s work is important and needs to be heard; we are grateful to have had the chance to document our interpretation of this beautiful piece.
Guillermo Lago’s Ciudades depicts his take on various sounds and musical styles from cities across the globe. Sarajevo echoes the despair and calamity surrounding the events of the Bosnian war in the mid 90’s with a haunting melody atop drones and ostinati. Addis Ababa evokes the vibrant energy of Ethiopia’s capital city through the use of extended techniques and the use of a traditional five-tone “kiñit” to create acrobatic melodies. These movements of Ciudades have a strong personal connection to our group, as they were some of the first works we played together when we formed in 2020. We would like to dedicate our recording of Sarajevo to producer and friend Trish Malin, who was one of our lovely hosts during our album recording sessions in Easton, Maryland. After hearing us play it in rehearsal, she expressed to us how powerful the piece was and instantly fell in love with it.
Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No.5, subtitled Portales de Madrugada, has become one of our most well-received selections. Elegant and graceful in style, Márquez captures the essence of the Cuban dance style in this original composition for saxophone quartet. Danzón No.5 is one of nine danzónes Márquez composed for various instrumentations – most famously No.2 for orchestra – connecting the saxophone to a wider classical tradition.
Paquito D’Rivera is a major figure in the latin jazz genre, known as a great clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer Among his many works is a saxophone quartet entitled Wapango. This is a short jazz-tinged tune based in the Mexican Huapango, twisting and turning through different registers of the saxophone in a quick waltz. This piece acts as a perfect segue to the final major work of the album, The Iberia Suite by jazz saxophonist Ed Calle. This three-movement set takes listeners through a cascade of latin jazz moods, featuring solos by our baritone saxophonist Brian Kachur, and this album’s guest artist Arun Luthra.
Our collaboration with Arun first began in December of 2021 on a guest artist recital at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From the first notes of our rehearsal, we knew he was a special musician and person. Aero could not be more grateful for Arun’s musical friendship and we are incredibly excited to have him be a part of our debut album. Arun’s tenor saxophone improvisations on The Iberia Suite add an extra layer of unique artistry to the piece and our record as a whole. Coltrane’s Dear Lord arranged by Dave Liebman is a sort of encore or epilogue to the tracklist, and even more heavily features Arun, now on soprano saxophone. This sensitive, reflective track is a final nod to the genres, styles, and friendships that make the album special.

Aero Quartet

In 1879, the young Alexander Glazunov met Mily Balakirev, who recommended he start lessons with his friend and fellow member of the ‘Russian Five’, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Glazunov was prodigiously talented and, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, progressed ‘not from day to day but from hour to hour’. He became a towering figure in Russian music but had reservations about modern trends. Glazunov was suspicious of Stravinsky’s use of dissonance, and said of Debussy: ‘Could it be that Rimsky and I influenced the orchestration of all these contemporary degenerates?’
Perhaps surprisingly given this attitude, Glazunov was quite taken with the distinctive – and distinctly modern – timbre of the saxophone, and he became one of the first major composers to write for the instrument. In 1932, his health deteriorating, Glazunov settled in Paris, where he composed very little – but did manage to write both a Saxophone Quartet in B-flat major (1932) and, at the persistent request of German saxophonist Sigurd Raschèr, his Saxophone Concerto in E-flat of 1934 (both of which share the opus number 109). The Saxophone Quartet opens with a sonorous movement characterised by curving melodies redolent of Dvořák or Brahms, while the second movement variations explore a range of textures from rich chorales to rapid, imitative flourishes. The contrapuntal rigour of the rondo finale, suggesting the influence of Baroque composers such as J.S. Bach, lends the movement an almost neoclassical feel.
Carlos Simon, from Atlanta, Georgia, is a GRAMMY-nominated composer and activist ‘with an ear for social justice’ (NPR Music). Drawing on diverse influences including gospel, jazz and romanticism, Simon is the Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. For string ensemble or saxophone quartet, Simon’s Elegy (A Cry from the Grave) pays powerful tribute to those who have been wrongfully murdered ‘by an oppressive power’: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown. As Simon explains: ‘The stimulus for composing the piece came as a result of prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch announcing that a selected jury had decided not to indict police officer Daren Wilson after fatally shooting an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.’ This harrowing subject-matter draws from Simon music of soulful lyricism supported by rich harmonies. A melodic idea is passed between the instruments in different guises – an ominous motif that ‘represents the cry of those struck down unjustly’. The Elegy’s mournful tone is lifted by bright harmonies representing ‘moments of extreme hope’.
Saxophonist Guillermo Lago’s composition career grew out of the need for more saxophone quartet repertoire. This Dutch composer, real name Willem van Merwijk, came to the rescue when his friends in the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet found themselves a few commissions short before a recording and a series of concerts. Their chosen theme was music inspired by Piazzolla, prompting the composer to write a tango under the Spanish-sounding pseudonym Guillermo Lago (an approximate translation of his real name). More works followed, many of them for saxophone, including the enormously popular Ciudades (‘Cities’, 2011) which has become a staple of the saxophone quartet repertoire. Lago’s response to this success: ‘I am very happy that I have been able to contribute to the repertoire of my beloved ensemble and instrument in this way.’
Lago has continued to add to this series of musical sketches. We hear ‘Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)’, which is dedicated to Lago’s many friends there. A decade after the devastation of the war of the 1990s, Lago helped to re-establish the saxophone class at the Sarajevo Academy of Music, as well as co-founding the ‘Winds of Change’ ensemble – Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first wind ensemble, comprising a group of young musicians each affected by the country’s recent history. The energetic ‘Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)’ was inspired by Lago’s collaboration with the Ethiopian singer Minyeshu, with whom he worked at the New Year’s Concert by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 2007.
Mexican composer Arturo Márquez has embraced a wide range of styles and media in his long career, including avant-garde and electroacoustic techniques, mixed media, interdisciplinary works, film scores and, more recently, the incorporation of popular styles into his musical language. This last approach is particularly evident in his hugely successful series of Danzónes, which use the rhythms and melodic shapes of 20th-century urban music alongside idioms from the Veracruz region of Mexico. Each Danzón is for a different instrument or ensemble. The subtitle of Danzón No.5 (Portales de Madrugada) for saxophone quartet (1997), refers to ‘portales’ – which in Mexico are arcaded commercial buildings – in the ‘early morning’. Portales de Madrugada may also be interpreted as ‘Snapshots of an Early Morning’, with its syncopated rhythms and bustling lines creating various images of an active city under the glow of a distant sunrise.
Paquito D’Rivera is a celebrated, multi award-winning Cuban American saxophonist and composer. He was taught the saxophone by his father before attending the Havana Conservatory of Music; later, alongside pianist and bandleader Chucho Valdés, he founded the Orchestra Cubana de Música Moderna and the fusion group Irakere. Wapango comes from D’Rivera’s album Mariel (on which he also performs a number by John Coltrane). The piece dates back to the 1970s, when D’Rivera wrote it for the saxophone quartet of his old friend Carlos Averhoff. The composer describes it as a sort of divertimento ‘inspired by the Huapango, one of the many musical styles from colourful Mexican folklore.’
Born in Caracas, Venezuela to Spanish parents, Ed Calle is a musical polymath who plays an array of instruments as well as composing and arranging. As a saxophonist he has made a huge number of recordings, working with a who’s-who of artists. Now based in Florida, he regularly tours internationally and is a professor at Miami Dade College. The Iberia Suite dates from 2004. The work starts with a jaunty Midnight Rumba, contrasted with the sultry and soporific Siesta, which features yearning harmonies, before concluding with the animated and rather enigmatic Pamplona.
John Coltrane is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. Soon after his early saxophone and theory lessons, he watched Charlie Parker in concert and was soon emulating Parker’s style. Coltrane was called up to the navy during 1945 and 1946; he was sent to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (a few years after the devastating attack there), where he played saxophone and clarinet in a swing band, the Melody Masters. Despite being beset by alcohol and drug problems, Coltrane’s talents were soon recognised and his post-war engagements included tours with Dizzy Gillespie and Earl Bostic who, in Coltrane’s words, ‘showed me a lot of things’ about saxophone technique.
Dear Lord (1965) reflected Coltrane’s new focus driven by a sense of spiritual awareness. In the liner notes to A Love Supreme (1964-65), Coltrane recalled: ‘During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.’ In the liner notes to the album Meditations, he is quoted as saying: ‘I believe in all religions’, and the ballad Dear Lord, from the 1965 album Transition, reflects that general embrace of a higher being rather than a specific deity. Heard here in an arrangement by another innovative American saxophonist, Dave Liebman – first recorded by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet on their 2015 Innova release Heritage/Evolution Volume I – Dear Lord is not so much a prayer or cry for help, as a mellow yet joyful affirmation of life.

© Joanna Wyld, 2023