The jazz trio The Kindness is a talented group of musicians who strives to perform at least once a semester in the ensemble hall inside the Eliza R. Snow building at BYU-Idaho. However, the jazz trio has never released an album until this year. The members of the trio are Jens Kuross on drums, Justin Neilson on piano, and Dr. Aaron Miller a BYU-Idaho faculty member on Bass.
In a BYU-Idaho radio interview Dr. Miller said the trio recorded its album in the fall of 2021 and has been preparing it for release since then.
"We had all the 2022 and some of 2023 getting it produced and mastered and everything,” he said. “The big part is that you will hear in the album, Jens has done a ton of post-production on all of the music. So, if you hear us live, you will hear the trio and sometimes we'll use a little bit of effects here and there on the music, but in this album, it's definitely a little more produced and there's more post-production, there's been added layers and other effects and sounds like that.”
Miller said the band was deliberately trying to avoid having the cliché jazz album sound.
“If you buy a symphony, like a recording of a symphony, there's kind of an expectation of what it's going to sound like,” he said. “And with acoustic jazz, there's definitely an expectation of how it's going to sound in the studio. And we intentionally were trying to avoid that as part of this project. And so more important to us was that it was interesting than that it was within the expectations. So, we were not trying to create something that sounded like all the other jazz albums.”
The self-titled new album from The Kindness Trio will be released on September 17 and will be available on media platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music. You can listen to the full interview with Dr. Milller by visiting www.soundcloud.com/byu-idaho-radio/the-kindness-trio-album-sneak-peak