Brian Ales' album November (1999) is a captivating fusion of jazz, experimental music, and atmospheric soundscapes.

If you are familiar with Brian Ales's last albums, you will very soon discover that 'November', makes it much easier to find a niche for the artist and his work.
However, 'easier' still does not mean 'easy'. Even if the word 'jazz' might cross your mind when talking about Ales and his recent compositions - leaving it at that tends to entail saying 'apple' if 'fruit' is what you actually meant. Brian Ales's music continues to unite more influences and impressions than can be expressed in any single term.

Surely the scope of his experience is the most important reason for that. In the course of his career Brian Ales has among other things worked as a producer and sound engineer, bringing finishing touches to many a wellknown colleague (among them Joe Lovano, Oliver Lake, Bob Moses and Lyle Mays); as a guitarist, composer and arranger he has not only written and produced numerous scores for movie and television productions in the US and Canada (more than a few of which award winners) but also for the two albums which appeared under his own name - 'Naiveté' (1993) and 'Creature of Habit' (1996) - which caused a stir among experts.

The special form which is part and parcel of Ales's music is a result of a particular way of working he developed before his actual 'career' took off:
As early as during his school days he earned a little extra in a small studio in Boston; and during those few short hours the studio was not rented out he had the opportunity to record and produce, which automatically led to endless night sessions. As a result, Ales got used to writing his own music or recording it on the spot in the studio and then immediately going into post production or changing things around so that composing and recording soon became individual parts of one and the same process - long before this became the normal thing to do thanks to MIDI technology.

It was self-understood for Ales that once he finished school he would continue working in the music business; and so in 1989 he took up an offer the Canadian Banff Center of Music made to supervise their newly installed digital, 24-track studio as an 'artist/technologist'. For more than two years Ales traveled back and forth between recording sessions in New York and Boston and post production dates in Banff; more often than not a tape would cover a few hundred miles before it found its final version.

Presumably, Ales would have continued somewhere along these lines, leading a comfortable life as a producer, if he had not one day chanced upon the application form for a movie soundtrack competition, which was being sponsored by BMI. Rather half-heartedly he sent in some of his own tapes - and won with flying colors. As a result of the event he moved to the film mecca Los Angeles and began to emphasize working on soundtracks and similar commissioned works.

Track Listing

• International Arrivals
• No Poetry
• Always Together Always Gone
• When It Would Fall Velvet Rain
• Like Vast
• Suits By The Pool
• November
• Shutter Speed
• Sad Man Club
• Candy Color Questions
• God Watch

Additional Details

Label: Intuition

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 52:32 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 06/20/25

UPC: 750447320925