My expectations of myself in this are low,” Michael Formanek said over Zoom from the music room of his West Orange, New Jersey house before embarking on his first-ever Before & After listening session. The 63-year-old bassist/composer was much too modest; his responses to a varied selection of tracks speak to the open, grounded, speculative attitude that infuses his 15 albums as a leader and his numerous collaborative and sideperson projects since 1990.
At that time, Formanek—who’d apprenticed as a Bay Area teenager on gigs with, among others, Joe Henderson, Tony Williams, and Eddie Henderson before moving to New York in 1978—was a first-call sideman, whose credits included stints playing “jazz music of all ends of the spectrum” with, to cite a short list, Freddie Hubbard, Fred Hersch, Stan Getz, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and the Mingus Big Band. Then, Formanek recalled, he shifted his focus to “composing, and also putting myself in situations that challenged and interested me. ‘Okay, I’ve done a lot of this, I know what this is, but now I need to find people, find ideas.’ Something happens on a project, and I’ll hyper-focus on that thing and it becomes the next thing, or I’ll make a clean break and start with a different instrumentation, as well as making records with people who call me more to contribute to the music rather than just come in and support everything else. I try to find my own vat of craziness from which to pull out material.”
Since moving to West Orange in 2018, after concluding 17 years on the faculty of Baltimore’s Peabody Institute, Formanek has conceptualized and executed numerous leader and collaborative projects. His good friend Adam Hopkins’ Out of Your Head label recently released , a duo encounter between Formanek and his son Peter on saxophone, and , documenting and . and (Cuneiform) are the fifth and sixth albums by the Thumbscrew trio with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, while is Formanek’s second solo bass album. The Swiss label Intakt, which released the latter title, also put out in 2018, with Formanek’s Elusion Quartet featuring Tony Malaby, Kris Davis, and Ches Smith; in 2019 they issued , a gorgeous trio recital with Halvorson and Berne, a frequent musical partner for the last 30 years.
