Rent Romus is a big picture kind of guy. Over the past quarter century he’s been a catalytic figure on the San Francisco Bay Area’s improv music scene as a player, producer, and proprietor of the invaluable Edgetone Records, a label responsible for nearly 200 releases by a daunting array of brilliant envelope-pushing artists. As a composer and bandleader, he’s pursued a similarly expansive vision with his Life’s Blood Ensemble, a talent-laden group for which he’s created a strikingly vivid body of music (often inspired by epic mythology drawn from his ancestral roots in Finnish culture).

For Rising Colossus, Romus brings his various musical worlds together. Focusing on original pieces he’s commissioned from younger Bay Area artists, Rising Colossus offers an incisive and often exhilarating glimpse at a scene that Romus has played an essential role in shaping. The LBE dives headlong into a disparate array of compositions, opening and closing the album with very different works inspired by epic tales.

– liner notes excerpt by Andrew Gilbert, San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area News Group