SNL Music Director Lenny Pickett Releases Fascinating New
Progressive Jazz Collaboration With Drum Virtuoso John Hadfield
New York, NY (For Immediate Release) – Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Heard By Others II (ÂR00111), the new collaboration between legendary saxophonist and Saturday Night Live music director Lenny Pickett and avant garde drum sensation John Hadfield.
Pickett’s accomplishments as a saxophonist, composer, arranger, and bandleader in multiple genres is truly remarkable. As a first-call session musician and as one of the early members of Tower of Power, he has collaborated with many of the great artists in popular music for the past half-century: Elton John, Rod Stewart, John Lee Hooker, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Mick Jagger, Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, Mariah Carey, Katy Perry, David Byrne, and St. Vincent, to name a few. He leads his own ensemble, The Borneo Horns, and has composed music for classical ensembles, theatre, film, and dance. He has been the music director of the Saturday Night Live band for three decades and is a member of the NYU jazz saxophone faculty.
John Hadfield is one of the most active and admired drummers and percussionists in the modern musical world. He appeared on Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammy-winning album Songs of Joy & Peace and the scores for films such as The Goldfinch, Gemini Man, Joker, and Drive Away Dolls. He continues to collaborate with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble as well as artists including Rachel Eckroth, Abel Selacoe, 9 Horses, Brad Shepik, Sam Minaie, and Ron Blake. He taught at NYU alongside Pickett until 2023.
He’s just so incredibly freeing to play with; he's got an exuberance in his playing that's grounded in an internal sense of pulse that's very fluid.”
The musical freedom and personal connection they found in each other is evident right from the start. Pickett’s writing on ‘Dance Music for 4 Saxophones #5 and #8’ is of a piece with the contrapuntal, deeply grooving arrangements he did for Borneo Horns and other artists, but with the added element of Hadfield’s dancing, skittering drum work. Working as adeptly on baritone, alto, and soprano saxophones as he does so famously on tenor and layering them each in individually, the “Pickett fence” of horns packs a punch, creating a firm foundation around which Hadfield weaves his intricate percussive textures; here the music wallops, there it lays back in the pocket. It’s heady, powerful, and unmistakably music to dance to.
Counterbalancing the Dance Music movements are Hadfield’s compositions, ‘Joshua Tree’ and ‘Jungle Room.’ The textures here are more atmospheric and synth-based, a chance for Hadfield to showcase his soundscaping skills on the Teenage Engineering OP1 and K.O. II synth/samplers. Pickett is as sonically adventurous as Hadfield, using his identifiable, exuberant sax technique, playing the Computone wind controlled E-mu systems synthesizer that he himself helped to develop. “In the early 70’s Wayne Shorter and a few other people were playing the Lyricon, an early electronic wind instrument,” Pickett says, “but I wasn’t satisfied with the sounds that it made. Like everyone else, I was a big Stevie Wonder fan and he had been using synthesizers on his records a lot of the time. Together with Herbie Hancock’s synthesist Patrick Gleason we worked on a way that I could use my Lyricon to directly control Pat’s synthesizer – and that was a glorious moment because it was a realization of what I wanted.”
Hadfield’s approach to musical synthesis seems to have had the same freeing effect on Pickett’s muse as his drumming. “‘Joshua Tree’ was influenced by the music of Terry Riley, in particular the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air,” Hadfield says. “In contrast to the Riley-esque minimalism of ‘Joshua Tree,’ ‘Jungle Room’ really reflects activity and motion. We have a little rhythmic game in the solos where we change tempo at the start of the form to add some momentum to the piece.”
Indeed, much of this music was recorded in separate locations and then combined piece-by-piece. “It was an amazing opportunity to be able to collaborate in this way,” Pickett says. “It's not the same as playing together, which we do comfortably and enjoyably, but it was a way of making something together without having to be in the same place at the same time. The electronic medium has always allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. And in the same way, this project was a moment of forced creativity where you had to use the tools that were available to you and make something.”
Pickett and Hadfield are two artists equally comfortable and adventurous working within either acoustic or electronic mediums, or both at the same time as in this project. Heard By Others II is the full realization of their collaboration as well as their sonic adventurousness, developed together, for decades.
For media requests, please contact Adhyâropa Records at adhyaroparecords@gmail.com. Physical copies and downloadable media available upon request.
Artist: Lenny Pickett and John Hadfield
Album Title: Heard By Others II
Label: Adhyâropa Records
Release Date: June 6, 2025 (EP: Heard By Others II)
Purchase: PURCHASE LINK
Performers: Lenny Pickett (saxophones, E-mu synthesizer); John Hadfield (drums, percussion, Teenage Engineering OP1 and EP 133 K.O. II)
