THRESHOLD REVIEW- REVIEWED BY GENE LEES
To gain an insight into what’s happening, it would be well to listen to a new album on Capitol called “Pat Williams: Threshold”. One is tempted to call it a jazz album, because it swings. But so elegantly are the elements of jazz and “legit” music interfused that the definition collapses on any serious reflection. Nor is it only Pat’s writing that makes it: He has assembled a twenty-seven man orchestra of musicians of comparable ambidextrous persuasion. They can function in either world, and in this album they are required to function in both, alternately or simultaneously. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important albums of the last ten years… But it is the new musical direction that Williams suggests to us that makes the album so overwhelmingly important.
…A section called On The Sixth Day is one of the most dazzling fanfares for brass you’ve ever heard; it promptly dissolves into a powerful jazz swing. In another section called The Witch, he uses a string quarter over a rhythm section. And he makes that string section- the violinists are Jerry Vinci and Jake Krachmalnick, the former concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra-swing.
Williams is working to set up an orchestra that is built for such younger men: players at university level or just beyond it, who are so far beyond the capabilities of the generations preceding them..This is the best instrumental album of the year. And it is very important.