New Album Edible Flowers is out on January 3, 2025!
“Fresh and inventive....’Edible Flowers’ is the quintessential jazz record.”
select Praise for previous Jessica Jones Quartet recordings:
“The ensemble wields such a confident understanding of its powers that the troupe is able to portray a straightahead ethos and then pare back its instrumentation to a single saxophone and bass while transforming “I Want To Talk About You” into a questing, slowly paced ballad.
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“With the chops to be a hell raiser and get away with it admirably, this set focuses on less is more without watering things down to scare off the core purists. Improv in the hands of pros, this is a ride on an off ramp that’ll give you great views.”
JESSICA JONES QUARTET
innovative. eclectic.
The Jessica Jones Quartet is an improvising jazz ensemble that performs inventive experimental music derived from the jazz tradition using structured original compositions as a framework for freer improvisation.
By combining the twin tenor saxophones of Jessica and Tony Jones with bass and drums, the group creates an exciting, robust new soundscape.
Following the acclaimed album MOXIE (2015), Jessica put the band together again with the release of CONTINUUM (2019). Featuring the innovative and energetic rhythm section of drummer Kenny Wollesen and bassist Stomu Takeishi, who are original members of the band from the 1980’s, the album embodies her approach to jazz as a seamless flow passed between players. From lustrous ballads to free improvs, from Thelonious Monk to Billy Eckstine, Continuum captures the frisson of a creative community exploring and listening together. 2025 brings the third album in a quartet setting, EDIBLE FLOWERS. Recorded in March 2020, Edible Flowers is a testament to a particular moment in history. A west coast version of the Jessica Jones Quartet, the group welcomed drummer Deszon Claiborne, a colleague and friend of Tony and Jessica since their time together in high school at the Summer Music Program at UC Berkeley and later in Peter Apfelbaum’s Hieroglyphics Ensemble. Jessica, Tony and Stomu had played together regularly over the previous decades, and Deszon fit right in, bonding with Stomu over subjects trivial and profound.
Covid awareness bloomed right alongside the tour: the group played workshops in the south Bay Area, had a concert there cancelled, and then squeezed out a memorable performance at the Bird and Beckett venue in San Francisco before the rest of the tour - and the US in general - was also shut down. They responded by creating a recording session in the house the New Yorkers were renting, documenting the band and this unique moment of time together on the brink of the unknown. The music echoes the bond the band created, stretching jazz interpretations into a signature looser arena that is their forte.
JESSICA JONES
composer
player
top left photo by Veronica Esqueda, top right photo by Bruce Smith, bottom left photo by Jim Bourne
teacher
NON-profit org:
rare earth vibration association (REVA)