PDXMMXVII (Pre-Order)

No drummer on jazz’s expansive landscape has collaborated more fruitfully with era-defining guitarists than Berkeley’s Scott Amendola. His new album, Scott Amendola Trio with Jeff Parker, adds an enthralling new chapter to his journey, reuniting him with Parker, the polymorphously creative guitar seeker, and bassist Paul Bryan (best known as the Grammy Award-winning producer of several albums by Aimee Mann).

Slated for release on CD and vinyl by Jealous Butcher Records on Nov. 06, 2026, it’s a poised and sinewy set gleaned from Amendola’s PDX Jazz Festival performance in 2018 with his Los Angeles-based comrades. The three musicians first met and played together at Berklee in the late 1980s and seized the opportunity to reconvene in Portland.

A single from the album, the briskly zig-zagging “Momentum & Backlash,” drops on September 24, 2026. With Parker sashaying over the double-time rhythm section tandem, it’s an Amendola piece commissioned by Intersection for the Arts and first released on the 2018 Invisible Bird project Flutter to Fuzz (with Brian Blade Fellowship guitarist Dave Devine).

The bulk of the tunes are drawn from Lift, the acclaimed 2010 Scott Amendola Trio album with Parker and the late bassist John Shifflett, though Parker’s extended intro on the title track, a numinous solo statement, infuses “Lift” with quiet grandeur. The album opens with “Swagger of the Tail Wagger,” a jaunty, episodic piece also gleaned from Flutter to Fuzz. On the supple, surging “Cascade” and the beatific closer “Tudo De Bom” the group plays with textural acuity and distilled lyricism.

A New York native who moved to San Francisco in 1992, Amendola has been a creative force for more than three decades. He first gained international attention as the only non-guitarist with T.J. Kirk, the Grammy-nominated quartet with Will Bernard, John Schott, and Charlie Hunter. He’s toured and recorded intermittently with Hunter ever since, while also working extensively with Wilco’s Nels Cline and Jim Campilongo.

As a bandleader, Amendola has created a large and varied body of work, from an orchestral commission to volatile duos. As the Los Angeles Times notes, “Amendola’s music is consistently engaging, both emotionally and intellectually, the product of a fertile and inventive musical imagination.”