Doug Beavers/Michael Zilber Group
Doug Beavers/Michael Zilber Group ‘Another Sunrise’ release November 6th, 2026 on Circle 9 Records
GRAMMY-WINNING TROMBONIST DOUG BEAVERS AND ACCLAIMED SAXOPHONIST MICHAEL ZILBER UNITE ON ANOTHER SUNRISE, A SEXTET ALBUM FEATURING PAUL BOLLENBACK, MIKE HOLOBER, BORIS KOZLOV AND MARKO MARCINKO
OUT November 6, 2026
GRAMMY-winning trombonist, composer, arranger and producer Doug Beavers and acclaimed saxophonist and composer Michael Zilber, “one of the true masters of the modern jazz saxophone,” (All About Jazz), will release Another Sunrise on November 6, 2026 via Beavers’ own Circle 9 Records. The first album by the Doug Beavers/Michael Zilber Group features guitarist Paul Bollenback, pianist and Fender Rhodes player Mike Holober, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Marko Marcinko, with four compositions from each leader.
Beavers and Zilber met at Los Medanos College in the Bay Area in 1994, where Zilber had recently begun running the jazz program after 15 East Coast years, largely in New York, and the 18-year-old Beavers was on an engineering track while continuing to study and play jazz. Zilber became a mentor, encouraging Beavers to go to New York and pursue music. Beavers did, building his own path through Latin jazz and salsa before the two reconnected years later as peers; Beavers also returned to Los Medanos to teach for two years. Zilber had met Marcinko through his own mentor, Dave Liebman, and introduced him to Beavers in 2013.
A performance at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn that year, with Marcinko on drums, sparked the project they would spend more than a decade trying to make. Marcinko called Zilber afterward asking for Beavers’ number. “He dug your playing,” Zilber recalls. “He was a definite for our project.”
By then, Beavers had become widely identified with Latin jazz and salsa through his work with Eddie Palmieri, while Zilber’s 15 led and co-led recordings remained more closely centered on acoustic jazz. Beavers saw their collaboration as an opportunity to make what he calls “a pure jazz record”; Zilber was interested in where their approaches might meet. “We liked what each other did musically and thought it would be an interesting combination because it would be neither one of the worlds people thought of us in,” he says — “a nice joining of worlds.” Their shared love of Don Grolnick also helped lead them toward guitar as part of the group’s sound.
When a recording window finally opened in fall 2025, they kept the plan simple. “We didn’t have a big window,” Beavers says. “The plan was: you do four tunes, I do four.” They did not coordinate the pieces by style, feel or mood; the idea, Zilber says, was to “just have our worlds meet.” Zilber had known Holober since his New York years; Beavers knew Kozlov from the Mingus Big Band and had previously recorded with him; and Bollenback came to Beavers through vibraphonist Joe Locke.
Zilber wrote the opening “Another Sunrise” shortly before the session, thinking about “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” and asking what the slow swing of Elvin Jones might sound like in five. “My whole thing with odd meters is I don’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, check out, this is in seven,’” he says. His “Un Poco Mas Loco,” written during the COVID period, reworks Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco.” “If you want to hear the real deal, put on Bud Powell,” Zilber says. “I want the melody recognizable. Then everything else is fair game — harmony, rhythm, meter, all that.”
Beavers’ four pieces span music written for the session and compositions he had carried for years. “Blades,” in B major, took its initial inspiration from Stevie Wonder’s fusion instrumental “Contusion,” while “Archetype” moves between seven and six. “The Telling of the Untold” dates to Beavers’ graduate studies at Manhattan School of Music; he later expanded it for studio orchestra before tightening it for this sextet. “Small Wonder,” an older, previously unrecorded composition, was a melody Beavers says he had long imagined Zilber playing.
“Clave Sorrateiro” came partly from Zilber hearing Kenny Garrett in Los Angeles, where a deep groove carried a five-over-four clave cycle. Sorrateiro means “sneaky,” and Zilber builds the tune around that rhythmic ambiguity, setting the three-side of clave in 5/4 against drums in four. During Beavers’ solo, he spontaneously quotes “Un Poco Loco,” linking the track back to Zilber’s earlier Bud Powell reworking.
The album closes with Zilber’s “Lullaby for a Sleepless Night,” written after sleepless nights during COVID and the loss of his mother. “One night I woke up around 2, couldn’t sleep, went to the piano and wrote it,” he says. Zilber gave the musicians their instructions immediately before recording, and the first full take became the performance. “And we all knew,” Beavers says. “We had it.”
Another Sunrise was recorded October 30, 2025 at Studio Mozart in New Jersey, with Beavers and Zilber seated beside one another in the live room and Bollenback sharing the space. Beavers remembers “great chemistry from the jump” among musicians coming together for a common purpose. Of the album, he says: “It’s kind of the proudest I’ve been of a jazz record I’ve ever done, really, in terms of the trombone aspect.”
“This record for us was more personal,” Beavers says. “It was something we wanted to bring kind of as brothers, and I think our brotherhood comes out in the music.” Zilber adds: “Everybody was just in service of the music. No egos. The whole spirit was right. We have a lot of common ground and shared history and love — not opposites, but complements.”
Michael Zilber & Doug Beavers – Studio Mozart, Little Falls NJ
Production Credits
Recorded October 30, 2025 at Studio Mozart, NJ, USA, engineered by KOSTADIN KAMCEV
Mixed and mastered January 3rd, 2026 by DAVID DARLINGTON at Bass Hit Recording, NYC
Cover design by Nadja von Massow / nad.works
Graphic Design by Chad McCullough
Produced by Doug Beavers
Executive Producers: Michael Zilber & Doug Beavers
Doug Beavers plays Antoine Courtois Paris trombones and Ono Mutes
Tracklist
1 Another Sunrise - 07:24
2 Un Poco Mas Loco - 06:12
3 Blades - 6:03
4 The Telling of the Untold - 6:09
5 Small Wonder - 6:11
6 Archetype -6:33
7 Clave Sorrateiro - 05:29
8 Lullaby for a Sleepless Night - 07:17
Tracks 1, 2, 7 8 by Michael Zilber (BMI)
Tracks 3-6 by Doug Beavers (9 Shades Music Publishing/ASCAP)
Personnel
Doug Beavers - trombone
Michael Zilber - tenor saxophone
Paul Bollenback - guitars
Mike Holober - piano & fender rhodes
Boris Kozlov - acoustic & electric bass
Marko Marcinko - drums
News
Reviews
High-quality, 320kbps audio download in MP3
Cat. No: #C90017
UPC: 666945418678