Here is what people are saying about Ghost Ships:

JazzReview (UK) - June 2003
by Jack Cooke

All three here are equally credited, as composers as well as players, on the opening track and the pervasive title track. Carrothers is credited for a further six, and his known ability to ferret out the improbable from the available for the rest of it offers the sense of his overall control. He's a fine pianist technically, never flashy for the sake of it; Stewart's worked with him before and is always on his wavelength; Denner I know nothing about except what's here and he's always intriguing.

"The Gathering" slowly builds on chords and swishing drums to Denner's entry, the first "Ghost ship" is equally impressionistic, then Wayne Shorter's "Water Babies", clean and spare, further develops a sense of liquidity before a sense of struggle. "In the Wheelhouse" returns to what might be happening on the surface and makes a break.

"Prelude To A Kiss" makes you think more of Sun Ra's interpretations from the early 90's than anything of Ellington's: Denner's alto recalling Marshall Allen, Carrothers' piano equally forceful - though his brief interpolation of "I Can't Get Started" also threw me towards Allen and Paul Bley, Barrage and the crazy daze of the ESP label...Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" gets a straight reading and is maybe a reminder that this material was recorded on 9/11 a year after. These things don't easily go away.

"Home Row" is fast and beboppy; "Ghost Ship (two) may be a gurgling meeting between Captain Nemo and the flying Dutchman, and the DeSilva, Brown, and Henderson "Your Hit Parade" lets you know that whatever anybody might be able to retrieve from the archives of popular music, Carrothers will ace them every tune. It might even be that the strange distant song behind the frantic clanging on "Ghost Ship" (three) could be Molloy and Kenney's "The Vagabond", from circa 1880 - it stirs vague memories, but I wouldn't put money on it. "Gitchee Gumee" is rather more serene than the title suggests; "The Navy Hymn" (better known here as "For Those In Peril On the Sea") seems deliberately to invoke the sense of something going - or gone.

It's fascinating, skilled; also quite eerie, arouses - perhaps is intended to convey - a sense of profound discomfort within its breadth of reference. Something that won't be forgotten once heard.

Minneapolis Star Tribune - May 30, 2003
by Tom Surowicz

Recorded in New York City one year after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, "Ghost Ships" often seems like a haunted, otherworldly album, although that clearly has a lot more to do with pianist Carrothers' take on distant history, his remembrances of naval things past, than any recent collective American distress.

Reunited with his mates from A Band In All Hope - saxophonist Anton Denner and quirky drum marvel Bill Stewart - the Twin Cities native gets a strikingly organic sound from his his keys, which all but breathe on a hovering cover of Wayne Shorter's "Water Babies." However, all is not ethereal on "Ghost Ships." There are a pair of rollicking post-bop swingers and a punchy, Monk-ish, acerbic version of Duke Ellington's "Prelude To A Kiss" that suggests a casual workout at the boxing gym as much as it does romance.

If there's a Sept. 11 echo on this great new disc, it can be heard in a spooky, irreverent version of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," with Denner wailing out the melody and Stewart unleashing a Pandora's box of drum tools and timbres.

Jazz Magazine - March 2003 - Disque d'Emoi

A magnificent sound clothes this recording.  An atmosphere, which one becomes immediately convinced is dressed like a phantom spaceship , so that one no longer has to leave:  The Gathering in so many brilliant voicings on which float a tenor with the counterpoint of cymbals;  and the tone is a given!  Obviously, the band knows itself and remembers who they are (nine years have yet passed since “A Band in All Hope” on Bridge Boy Music), from which there is a certain clarity in the collective expression.  An immortal ballad of Duke (Prelude to a Kiss) cements a pure connivance of accents, equally of an account of strong emotions.  Above all Denner—flirting with Getz, Rollin, Ernie Watts—holding then his notes long in the mouth, to better kiss them.  A them of Wayne Shorter, definitively stamped a la Davis, and—there’s the music, cajoled, that turns around the melody (baritone sax), gorges itself on emotion, breathes, plants itself in three open hands so it can more effectively flower.  And the play, always the play, of influence and of sharing, cascades of clear notes (soprano—piano) on a stream of toms that roll with pleasure.  They even close with a sea chanty, a breath of fresh air (literally, fresh air freeing up days of foam/scum).   After an electric episode, the whimsical Carrothers rebounds with a jazz that doesn’t look for its impact in the direction of volume, but rather in its depth, its fragrance.  In the end, it’s about the joining of thick sonorities.  It's an elegant and opulent example of the perfume of jazz. 

Jazzman Magazine - 4 stars

CentralJazz

In this last album, Ghost Ships, one finds in Sketch the aesthetic and artistic coherence of the label: the object initially, digipack with the small pocket of phantoms of texts, with the braided lines of the colors of each instrument and in addition, an impeccable sound orchestrated by the faithful Gerard de Haro, even if for the circumstance, they went to New York City to follow the trio of Bill Carrothers, Anton Denner and Bill Stewart. Because they act, once again, of a true trio and not of the disc of a leader with pianist in addition, they are excellently surrounded for the occasion.

In the infernal continuation engaged by the trio, when one endeavors to follow one of these three musicians, one is grabbed invariably by the other two: impossible to be detached from the unit, each is fastened to the mast as surely as Ulysses and his companions under the influence of Circé, the magician. A true fascination emerges from this continuation of melodies which are connected ineluctably until the episode (epilogue) final, a kind of history of the American dream which underwent disillusions and disenchantments. Indeed, the album, recorded exactly one year after September 11, 2001, vibrates of a certain national feeling (but not nationalistic). One knows the attachment of Bill Carrothers to America and its history, since the very beautiful disc on the American Civil War, The Blues and the Greys. After a first topic of the trio, a symbolic system of gathering, it is a traditional air, "The Navy Hymn", with the funeral pace of march which closes the album, after a diverted and distorted version of God Bless America. Meanwhile the topics of Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter and Brown/de Silva/Henderson join the collective compositions of the trio or those written by Bill Carrothers.

A serious music, exalted, demanding, lyric and somber, that makes one marvel at the thick rumblings of Bill Stewart, the harsh and tender cry from the saxophones of Anton Denner, and the slow and penetrating hammer of the piano. Listen only to In The Wheelhouse to be convinced. An atmospheric music that seizes one inescapably: one can only abandon oneself in shivering at this strange climate, fantastic like a genre film, disturbing, but never weighty. As to the story, each can tell his own, and finally; don't ask for whom the bell tolls.
- Sophie Chambon

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