Over Here

Description

By titling his eighth album Criss Cross Over Here!, trumpeter Jim Rotondi revisits the sentiments he expressed with The Move, his seventh album for the label. "It's not necessarily about migrating elsewhere, but rather about coming back home, playing tunes with a lot of direct swing and interesting chord sequences with musicians I'm comfortable with," Rotondi stated in the booklet. This is an effective description of what happens in Rotondi's latest swinging adventure. But while he wasn't wrong, he wasn't telling the whole story. Indeed, The Move foreshadowed Rotondi's decision to leave New York for Austria in 2010 to take a position as a trumpet professor at the University of Graz. As the current title indicates (which references George M. Cohan's 1917 song "Over There" and Rotondi's father's service in Europe during World War II), Rotondi has been settled on the continent for thirteen years, adding to his teaching responsibilities several trips a year to New York and other American cities, as well as tours in the jazz clubs of Central Europe, Italy, France, Spain, and the UK.