Outer Reaches, drummer Ralph Peterson‘s 15th album as a leader overall, is also the inaugural release on his Onyx Music label and will be available on April 5, 2011.
The composer-bandleader and talent scout extraordinaire Ralph Peterson has carried on in the tradition of his mentor and idol Art Blakey, who was renowned for his hard-driving approach to the kit and his uncanny knack for discovering new talent. Similarly, Peterson helped launch the careers of several promising young players in his various bands over the years, including trumpeters Sean Jones and Jeremy Pelt, saxophonists Steve Wilson, Ralph Bowen and Tia Fuller, vibist Bryan Carrot and pianist Orrin Evans. With his Unity Project, Peterson adds three new names to the list – trumpeter Josh Evans, tenor saxophonist Jovan Alexandre and Hammond B-3 organist Pat Bianchi. Together with their fearless leader, they collectively push the envelope to extremes on Outer Reaches, an exhilarating homage to Larry Young’s classic 1965 Blue Note recording Unity.
“This is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” says Peterson in a news release of his new Unity Project release. “It was another goal realized, and now we’re trying to wake everybody up to the good news about it as I plot the next move.”
A respected educator who is a professor at the Berklee College of Music, Peterson’s protégés include such potent new drummers on the New York scene as Ari Hoenig, E.J. Strickland, Justin Faulkner, Rodney Green, Vince Ector, Jonathan Blake, Dion Parsons and Mark Whitfield Jr. He is also a clinician and endorser for Mapex Drums, Vic Firth Sticks, Axis Pedals as well as Bosphorus Cymbals, where he designed their newest cymbal line aptly called The Oracle.
