The Dylan Jack Quartet will release a holiday recording titled “Winter Panes” on Nov. 15. Following up its Nosferatu-themed silent film adventure and live concert experience “Eine Quartett des Grauens” (2023), the Dylan Jack Quartet could have gone any number of directions.
Half-jokingly, the Massachusetts-based drummer calls the group’s fifth release, “Winter Panes,” a “holiday album.” It is the first DJQ album to feature no original music. The impetus was an invite: on a recent tour, one venue asked the group back for a holiday concert.
Jack and DJQ stalwarts Jerry Sabatini (trumpet), Eric Hofbauer (guitar/effects) and Tony Leva (double bass) began to brainstorm “less common ways of looking at the winter landscape,” the drummer recalled. Feeling the cold took no imagination: “We recorded in January,” Jack said. “.
.. It was, like, two degrees the next day.
It was so cold. We recorded in a church, and when I walked up the stairs, there was this window outside, just covered in ice, so beautiful, with a chandelier hanging above it. I took a picture and it just had to be the album cover.
Then I thought about naming the album after this picture in some way, with different cultures representing these different panes. If you look out this window, you might see the more eastern side of it, maybe, but it’s still the same landscape no matter what — part of this bigger, larger window.” The first two DJQ albums, “Diagrams” (2017) and “The Tale of .