Randy Brecker Joins CHARGED PARTICLES on CELEBRATING MICHAEL BRECKER
Tenor saxophonist Tod Dickow leads the Bay Area collective on a tribute to the late Michael Brecker.
The Bay Area collective Charged Particles is releasing its second live album, titled Celebrating Michael Brecker, available November 20 on Origin Records. The performance was recorded August 3, 2025, and captures the musicians 'at their peak powers,' featuring trumpeter Randy Brecker as special guest, recorded at the historic Half Moon Bay club.
After heaping high praise on the band's previous recording, 2021's Charged Particles Plays the Music of Michael Brecker: Live at the Baked Potato!, iconic trumpeter Randy Brecker decided to join the band on select dates through its U.K. and Stateside tours from 2022 to 2025.
'By then, we were pretty well-versed with the material, and our chops were up,' said Brecker, who was just a few months shy of his 80th birthday at the time of this gig. 'Some of the tunes aren't easy, because they don't lay that well on the trumpet,' he added, noting that tunes featured on Michael Brecker's 1996's Tales from the Hudson and 2007's Pilgrimage were originally written for his tenor sax and Pat Metheny's guitar in mind. 'All in all, I fit in pretty well, and we bonded nicely together.'
Credit veteran San Francisco tenor saxophonist Tod Dickow, a standout on Live at the Baked Potato!, with helping to create that bond with Randy on the frontline. A player of rare passion and intensity on his horn, Dickow hits some powerful Breckerian heights throughout the rousing session.
'I certainly listened to enough of Mike's music that it's going to come out in my playing,' said Dickow. 'He is a model of perfection, and I've always looked at his playing as something to strive for.' And as drummer-bandleader and group founder Jon Krosnick noted: 'Mike is in Tod's blood, his sound, and his philosophy.'
Dickow delivers stirring solos on Joey Calderazzo's modal 'El Niño' and the pianist's blues-tinged medium swinger, 'Midnight Voyage,' as well as on Brecker's New Orleans street beat number, 'Madame Toulouse,' his rhythmically choppy stop-start number 'Loose Threads' (originally created for 2002's Directions in Music, a cooperative venture between Michael Brecker, Herbie Hancock, and Roy Hargrove, and later reprised on Brecker's 2007 swan song, Pilgrimage), and his profoundly moving ballad, 'When Can I Kiss You Again?'
Randy erupts with crackling high-note flurries on several tunes, including the Latin montuno-like section of 'El Niño,' 'Madame Toulouse', and the dramatic closer, 'Pilgrimage,' which finds him turning in his most cathartic playing of the set. Randy also blends seamlessly with Dickow in some intricate harmony lines on 'Loose Threads' as well as on Hal Galper's 'Triple Play,' a triplet-based swinger that the Brecker Brothers played together back in the day on the Galper Quartet's 1978 album, Redux.
Pianist Murray Low contributes some stellar solos throughout, while comping in tastefully syncopated fashion alongside the solid rhythm tandem of upright bassist Aaron Germain and versatile drummer Krosnick.
That trio began working together around the Bay Area in 2011. After doing nearly a thousand gigs together, tenor titan Dickow came on board in 2015, subsequently playing a key role on Charged Particles Plays the Music of Michael Brecker: Live at the Baked Potato! And now, in the presence of Michael's trumpet-playing brother Randy, he takes things up a notch on Celebrating Michael Brecker.
Over the course of three incarnations of the group, including a move from Ohio to California in 2011, Charged Particles has periodically featured a variety of special guests, including guitarists Nguyen Le, Barry Finnerty, and Dewa Budjana, vocalists Kevin Lettau, Beata Pater, and Rocío Guitard, conguero Omar Ledezma, and woodwind player and Oregon co-founder Paul McCandless.
As their newest special guest, Randy rises to the occasion on this, Charged Particles' second heartfelt homage to his brother, the beloved, hugely influential multiple Grammy-winning saxophonist-composer who passed away at age 57 on January 13, 2007, after succumbing to a long struggle with leukemia.
Photo Credit: Jim Bourne
Photo Credit: Jim Bourne
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