photo: John Rogers
Three of the most gifted improvisers in free jazz today released this week a studio follow-up from their well-received 2009 live debut. As fellow giants of the NYC downtown scene, William Parker, Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver know each well musically and personally (as noted before, Cleaver and Taborn go way, way back). That means that whenever they put their collective skills together to spontaneously create music, it’s not labor, it’s a conversation at an otherworldly level. As musicians, they stumble on ideas and run with them. For the listener, it’s a treasure hunt to dig into the music and discover those ideas, like the huge expanse of spaces in “For Fred Anderson” representing the void the song’s subject left behind by his passing just the day before this song was both conceived and recorded. Or the alien “how does he do that?” beat Cleaver metes out about six minutes into the continually veering “Tait’s Traced Traits.” Or Parker’s spooky strings scraping as Taborn pecks out a few selected notes on “Sir Snacktray Speaks,” or the group-stagger/swagger of “Cutting’s Gait.” Or the gradually unwinding ostinato of “Mud, Mapped” (see Youtube of excerpt below). And those are just a few of the more obvious maneuvers. Give me another year listening to this and I might figure out about 25% of this record. But that’s kind of the point: the fun is in hunt and never completely resolving it keeps me coming back.
Out Of This World Distortions, from AUM Fidelity, hit the streets this past Tuesday.
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