"★★★★ – Worth the wait...a masterful, Frisell-like blurring of genre lines." – MOJO

"Bear Proof offers a musical experience that is as visceral as it is abstract, as accessible as it is complex, as deeply felt as it is deeply thoughtful, and wonderfully original. The 62-minute, nine-track album is played straight through, and except for a couple of minor fixes, is delivered as played, carrying the energy of a live performance...At times, the unusual and potently expressive harmonies seemed to come from a new tonal system, something between the cracks of the standard diatonic scale, either dreamed up by Sickafoose or beamed down from the Mother Ship—all of it intensified by his extraordinary command of sonic texture and the adventurous and disciplined playing of each musician. What ears they have. Every tune develops organically, and surprises are everywhere...the entire album is a highlight.” – MUSICALLY SPEAKING

"★★★★ – Fantastic...a wealth of ideas come to full fruition.” – JAZZ TRAIL

“Quite transcendent…seems to glow from within…a completely unexpected delight." – Bruce Lee Gallanter / DMG 

“Collaborative-compositional tour de force.” – DOWNBEAT

"★★★★ – This quietly intense work is the kind of music that reveals its power the more one listens to it...engrossing and entertaining.” Jerome Wilson / ALL ABOUT JAZZ

"Rarely does an album become so embedded in me that I want more listens—and so layered that I need multiple plays. That’s the way it is with bassist and composer Todd Sickafoose’s grand jazz symphony of composition meets improvisation that defies categorization. Bear Proof is created by an octet that at times moves eerily with mystery, buoys with a gentle lyricism, colors the soundscape with instrumental tones and blending timbres, haunts with walls of rhythm, scrapes with gripping avant pockets that create moments where melodies emerge at the edge of beauty. There are crosscurrent tempo and rhythmic shifts and harmonic mischief. Plus, best of all, there are the multitude of surprises. Todd calls his work “a surreal meditation on boom and bust.” What’s most impressive throughout this entire theatrical journey are the artists who move with him in simpatico. It’s incredibly mind-blowing that he has assembled brilliance, including drummer Allison Miller, guitarist Adam Levy, violinist Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, pianist Erik Deutsch and others. The title? A warning of sorts. He writes that Bear Proof is about withstanding downturns. “It’s that thing that protects you from the bad times, a skin that you put on.” Comments like this reveal Todd’s personal connection to his large-scale vision—majestic but also humbling in the face of cataclysmic collapse." – Dan Ouellette / JAZZ & BEYOND

"★★★★ – Sickafoose’s return to jazz oozes left-field class. The album...seamlessly conjoins nine dynamic, packed-with-detail compositions into a continuous work. Production is crystal-clear, emotions cinematic and the ultra-precise playing grips.” JAZZWISE UK

"Todd Sickafoose’s gripping new release...is, by turns, consonant and dissonant, calm and boisterous, hard-driving and nearly out of tempo; its movement accentuates how easily one state slips into another, and back. Foreground drifts into background, and vice versa. Cycles build and then dissolve. Each song, and the entire album, is like a mosaic of irregular parts that conjoin to form a sensible whole.” – Larry Blumenfeld / WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Every bit as stunning as its predecessor, 2008’s Tiny Resistors...it is also an album with its own distinct character." – Todd Manning / ROCK AND ROLL GLOBE

WEST COAST ALBUM RELEASE CONCERTS:

Oct 19, 2023 – Holocene w/ Blue Cranes (Portland OR) *co-presented by Creative Music Guild
Oct 20, 2023 – Earshot Jazz Festival @ Town Hall (Seattle WA)
Oct 21, 2023 – Palo Alto Art Center (Palo Alto CA)
Oct 22, 2023 – Angel City Jazz Festival @ Moss Theatre (Santa Monica CA)

album CREDITS

Jenny Scheinman - violin 
Adam Levy - guitar 
Erik Deutsch - piano 
Ben Goldberg - clarinet 
Kirk Knuffke - cornet 
Rob Reich - accordion 
Allison Miller - drums 
Todd Sickafoose - acoustic bass 

Produced by Todd Sickafoose. 
Recorded by Adam Muñoz at Fantasy Studios (Berkeley CA). 
Mixed by Todd Sickafoose at Earycanal. 
Mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering (Portland ME).
Original artwork by Grady McFerrin.
Photographs by Alex Chaloff.
Design remix by Brian Grunert for White Bicycle (Buffalo NY).

BEAR PROOF is

62 minutes of music for 8 musicians. Intended to be performed straight-through in a concert, it’s captured here “live” in the studio, recorded as one continuous take. We fixed a few notes afterward – including a moment somewhere in the first half where Jenny dropped her bow, and somewhere in the second where I dropped mine. Otherwise, this is exactly how that 62 minutes sounded. A raise of the glass to Adam Muñoz for keeping the tape rolling without interruption at Fantasy Studios (Berkeley, California); and for that matter, to Derk Richardson – who, the night before, encouraged us to play the whole thing live on his KPFA radio program ‘The Hear and Now’. He sat amongst us, lost in his headphones, and chose quiet moments to grin and whisper the requisite station identification – a detail that added to the sense of mischief. The fact that Fantasy has since shuttered its doors, and Derk has retired his long-running show, is a sign that it’s taken us a few years to release this album.

And noting these cultural disappearances is apt because, if you’d like, BEAR PROOF can also be:

A surreal meditation on BOOM and BUST. Is music perhaps better than words for talking about high times and utter ruin? In California, there’s still a bridge that spells out GOLD HERE. Let these nine song titles lead you in that direction, if you wish. 

–Todd

Bear Proof was made possible with support from Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development program funded through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

So far, we’ve had the pleasure of performing Bear Proof at the Freight & Salvage (Berkeley CA), Blue Whale (Los Angeles CA), The Shedd (Eugene OR), Ars Nova Workshop (Philadelphia PA), Le Poisson Rouge (NYC) and the 2020 Winter Jazz Fest (NYC).