One great jazz drummer as well as both a bandleader and a sideman. Many consider his Quartet (which includes guitarist John McLean, bass trumpeter Ryan Shultz and bassist Larry Kohut) the best jazz band in Chicago. Chicago Sun-Times critic Llyod Sachs says his quartet's "acute, darkly shimmering postbop sound is one of the most distinctive Chicago has produced in years." His CDs include Chameleon Eyes (1993), All Things Equal (1996), and Ennead<.i> (where the Quartet plays the music of Dennis Luxion). "Stitely is a precise and flawless drummer with great range and perspective." says Jazziz Magazine. "Like Charles Mingus on bass, he has a tremendous talent for leading the way from the background."
In a Chicago Reader critic's choice, Neil Tesser says, "In his own drum solos Stitely offers plenty of thunder, but he ignores the petty flamboyance and predictable patterns that have given drum solos a bad name. Instead he concentrates on structure and form, and he and his band apply that approach to each piece in their repertoire, unveiling one impressive stratagem after another to burrow deep into their material. As a result, they consistently squeeze something new and often exhilarating out of tunes they?ve played a dozen times before." ?The most striking feature of this ensemble," says the Chicago Tribune's Howard Reich, "is that it genuinely functions as a unit. The idea here is not to offer a series of ostentatious solos but to create a fabric of sound... The caliber of each of these players, and the seriousness with which they collaborate, says a great deal about how deep the current jazz resurgence runs."
Stitely also plays regularly with pianist Patricia Barber at the Green Mill.
For more information, visit their website: http://www.jsqmusic.com
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