Artist: Michael Moss

Album: Quantum Butterfly

Label: Fourth Stream Records

Street Date: Nov. 1, 2026

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Michael Moss releases a wide-ranging and consistently inventive four-CD set, Quantum Butterfly.

 

With Moss alternating between tenor, soprano, clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute, Quantum Butterfly features his Roots To Shoots jazz combo, the electronic title cut, and his string orchestra Ensemble Bows for Strings, Piano and Reeds.

 

Throughout his career, Michael Moss has always had a very strong curiosity about music. While based in jazz and improvisation, exploring everything from hard bop to free jazz along with inspiration from Stravinsky to Schoenberg, Moss is also an innovative composer who has been inspired by world music.

Quantum Butterfly is a four-CD set that features Moss on various reed instruments, performing originals and often-surprising renditions of jazz standards. CD Volume 1 and Volume 4 feature his “Roots To Shoots” group, a quartet/quintet with pianist Alexis Marcelo (doubling on synthesizer), bassist Adam Lane (who creates some miraculous solos) and drummer-percussionists Jackson Krall, Michael Wimberly and Ismael Baiz. The veteran vibraphonist, drummer and percussionist Warren Smith (who was 87-91 years old during these performances but sounds quite ageless) is a major presence on some of the songs and Bobby Harden has a guest vocal.

While Roots to Shoots performs inventive renditions of such songs as Chick Corea’s “La Fiesta,” Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” John Coltrane’s “Afro Blue” and  “Transition” along with Moss’s originals, CD Volume 2 explores Moss’s deconstruction of 21st century classicism with his group “Ensemble Bows for Strings, Piano and Reeds.”  Four works featuring Moss with a string section and a rhythm section debuting adventurous third-stream music is filled with mood variations and surprises including the 19-minute “Abyss” and his thoughtful and episodic “Elegy For Danny.” CD Volume 3 in this release showcases Moss with his quartet swinging a couple of relatively straight ahead originals, then interacts with James Dashow’s electronics on the intriguing ATMOS 25-minute exploration “Quantum Butterfly/Adjacent Possibles.”

Throughout Quantum Butterfly, whether playing tenor, soprano, bass clarinet, clarinet, or flute, Michael Moss always displays an original and personal tone along with an explorative style, sounding unlike anyone else. He played piano and clarinet early in life, adding the tenor-sax while a teenager in order to perform with his school band and at local clubs. As a freshman in college, Moss worked with Ben Sidran, becoming proficient in bebop while also being inspired by discovering such innovators as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. In the 1970s, he was president of the musicians’ cooperative Free Life Communication, led the groups Four Rivers and Free Energy, and was a member of Sam Rivers’ all-reed ensemble The Winds Of Manhattan. Moss founded 4th Stream Records and the music publishing company ERG, recorded with Annette Peacock, and studied the folk music of the Middle East, India, Senegal, Japan, China, Thailand, Ireland, Romania, and various other European countries. In his career he has worked with such notables as Badal Roy, Richie Beirach, Dave Liebman, Michael Urbaniak, Dave Burrell, Bob Moses, and William Parker. Among the groups that he has led in recent times has been the 22-piece Accidental Orchestra comprised of some of today’s foremost experimental musicians including Jason Kao Hwang, Fung Chern Hwei, Melanie Dyer, Stephanie Griffin, Rosi Hertlein, George Crotty, Victor Chancey, Elliot Levin, Warren Smith, Badal Roy, Bob Meyer, Steve Swell, Waldron Mahdi Ricks, Ras Burnett Moshe, Ken Filiano, Larry Roland, Dom Minasi, Peter Zummo, and Brian Groder.

Quantum Butterfly features Michael Moss in prime form as an improviser and includes some of his finest playing and writing along with a stellar supporting cast.