Grammy-nominated pianist and composer Larry Goldings and tap dancer extraordinaire Melinda Sullivan are proud to release Big Foot, an innovative, one of a kind album on Colorfield Records.

When Goldings and Sullivan met shortly before the COVID pandemic, they had no way of knowing just how impactful it would become for both of them. By 2021, they had begun meeting in Goldings’ backyard to play together and posting videos of their jam sessions to social media. The project was immediately recognized by musicians and journalists who saw in the connection of tap dance and jazz, a deep legacy stretching back over 100 years.

It was inevitable that the duo would eventually take the project off the socials and into the studio. From the beginning, they knew that they would need to develop a specific sonic language for the recording. This led them to engineer-producer Pete Min, a man committed to making artful records that explore the space between improvisation and composition, chaos and control, intention and discovery.

One of the challenges of recording with a tap dancer, Goldings and Sullivan found, was that the music had to remain listenable - as music - without dwelling on the process of how it was made. Big Foot finds the balance between making the recording musically compelling without over-manipulating the sonic landscape, truly featuring Sullivan as a percussive dancer. “My main thing,” says Goldings, “was that I wanted people to hear what Melinda does.”  

During the recording sessions, Goldings immersed himself in analog synthesis and employed a catalog of keyboards that would make any electronic enthusiast envious. Sullivan dances in socks, sand and sneakers for the majority of the album, allowing her rhythmic nuance to come forward. The toe, heel, slide, and taps that she coaxes are complex, sometimes evoking brushes on a snare drum, other times tablas or frame drums, and still other times the sound of an analog drum machine or beat box.

Other contributors to the record include Sam Gendel on saxophone and effects, CJ Camerieri on trumpet and flugelhorn, Daphne Chen on violin and viola, and bassist Karl McComas-Reichl. Each of them brings their personal sound to an already unusual party.  And Goldings’ daughter Anna sings a particularly haunting melody on “Do You Like,'' a song that opens with the voice of another luminary, drummer Steve Gadd.  It is Gadd’s voice asking the question “Do you like…?” before he begins to tap out a gently grooving pattern with his hands on a box.

Many of the compositions on Big Foot evoke film cues, in part because of their unraveling structure. They begin, they develop, they end somewhere unexpected. Larry admits that, “Film scores are an influence on this music. So is Björk, and Joe Zawinul.”  

But whatever the journey and the influences may have been, simply put Big Foot is great music that is extremely difficult to execute but very easy to listen to.

About Colorfield Records:

Colorfield Records is a new label based out of Pete Min's Lucy's Meat Market Studio in LA. Colorfield artists are encouraged to compose in the studio, often playing instruments that they're not accustomed to and relying as heavily on sound as on musicianship and composition. The process is designed to emphasize getting outside of comfort zones in order to increase spontaneity and exploration.