Grammy Award-Winning Violinist Zach Brock Releases New Album Featuring Supergroup

American jazz violinist and multi-Grammy Award-winning member of Snarky Puppy Zach Brock releases his new album Dirty Mindz, out now on GroundUP Music. Featuring Snarky Puppy members Mark Lettieri and Justin Stanton, Eric Harland, and Jonathan Maron, the quintet subverts the expectations of what a violin should sound like through a musical voice that Brock has previously held back from expressing.

In celebration of the new release, Zach Brock debuts a new video for the single "The Last Song" live from Sony Hall in NYC.

'Dirty Mindz,' the ninth solo album from acclaimed violinist and Grammy Award-winning Snarky Puppy member Zach Brock, was almost fated to not see the light of day. In the months - and, thanks to the pandemic, subsequent years - after the bulk of the album was recorded at Dreamland Studios in upstate New York in October 2019, the much sought-out musician kept hitting a wall with the project.

"There were many times I gave up on this record mentally," Brock explains, but whenever he considered moving on to something new, the unfinished album kept pulling him back in, its tracks latching onto him like magnets each time.

On "The Last Song" Brock notes, "The entire recording was in a holding pattern when the pandemic reached the United States. I wasn't finished writing and didn't know if we would ever get the chance to play music together again. Thankfully the chance presented itself in January of '22 and suddenly we had a small window of dates at an amazing venue where we could record live audio and video at Sony Hall in NYC. But I still didn't have a song. As I dove back into the quintet material, "The Last Song" seemed to emerge almost fully formed."

The record represents a liberation of sorts - one that shuns pretentiousness and ego in favor of inventive ideas that link back to the core of what jazz means to Zach. "One of the things that drew me to jazz as a rebellious teenager was a message in the music - that defining your own voice was not only encouraged but celebrated," he says, and Dirty Mindz takes him on a fresh voyage to achieving that with the help of a spectacular ensemble, including Snarky Puppy's Mark Lettieri, Chris Bullock and Justin Stanton, Grammy-nominated bassist Jonathan Maron and lauded drummer Eric Harland.

His experiences with Snarky Puppy also helped break down some of those self-imposed barriers and had a noticeable impact on Dirty Mindz's direction. Playing alongside (and sometimes having his solos mistaken for the sound of) multiple guitarists opened the violinist up to pushing his instrument into new territory.

"I've worked at sounding like a guitar for a really long time and I was exploring analog synth sounds when I wrote these songs, but I hadn't given myself the creative license to use those sounds on a recording in this way," explains Brock.

Watch the new music video here:

Listen to the new album here:

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