Bandleading

Great jazz quartets have often flowered when a bandleading pianist finds a soulmate on sax: Monk and Charlie Rouse, for instance, or Brubeck and Paul Desmond.

But Israel belongs to the select group of drummers--Art Blakey, Max Roach, Paul Motian, and Ronald Shannon Jackson among them--who approach bandleading with fresh and distinctive vision.

Gonzalez has undoubtedly developed his musical facility by learning to occupy either the foreground of a piece as a trumpeter or its background as a conguero; his bandleading and horn playing have kept him pretty busy over the years, but he easily could've succeeded as a drummer.

[…] it’s taken a while for him to bring his ideas about composition and bandleading into balance with his own playing.