Michael Marcus

Soulifications is a trio album by reedman Michael Marcus with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, recorded on June 14, 2004 at MuRec in Milan. The closing Garden Of The Clouds was taped live at the Blue Note in New York on January 17, 2005. All seven pieces are Marcus compositions, and Soul Note released the disc in 2006.

Marcus plays tenor saxophone, saxello and clarinet, Mateen acoustic and electric bass, Waits drums. Paolo Falascone engineered the Milan session, Flavio Bonandrini produced and Aldo Borrelli mastered, and the booklet carries a poem by Laurence Weisberg. Jeff Stockton, in All About Jazz (July 2006), reviewed it next to Zetrons, the latest album of the Cosmosamatics, the band Marcus co-led with Sonny Simmons. He wrote that Marcus, missing his partner, overdubs and duets with himself on a pair of tracks and plays two horns at once, in the manner of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, on the thirteen-minute News From Sedna. Mateen's electric bass gives Talk-Walk an African highlife rhythm under a folk melody, and Harmonious Beatious opens the disc as a tone poem for tenor, arco bass and malleted drums. Stockton called the bass and drums "one of the finest young rhythm sections in the business". Harmonious Beatious and Road Dogg also appear on Zetrons, where Stockton found the same ballad more sinuous with two horns.

Soul Note CD 121473-2, first released in 2006.