AAM, 9-1-2019 Exploratorium, Berlin.

AMM Photos by Christina Marx

By Paul Acquaro

About mid-way through AMM's second set of the evening at Berlin's Exploratorium, my mind wandered to the street that I lived on in central N.J. for thirteen years. When I moved in, the street was lush with majestic oaks and maples. Then, over the years, the large shade trees began disappearing. Some because of age, some from freak climate change storms, some from when the utility company repeatedly and mercilessly hacked at them, and finally, many more as a good number of idiot homeowners with no sense took them down. So, as the AMM slowly unfolded their musical tapestry, I thought about how at first when the big shade trees dwindled, the secondary layer of trees in people's yards became more vibrant ... ornamentals and evergreens appeared that I hadn't noticed before. That, I thought, was a little like AMM. The trio of drummer Eddie Prévost, pianist John Tilbury, and electronics Keith Rowe are quiet. They are not making big bold statements, rather the beauty is in the smaller gestures - refined dashes of tonal color, gentle swoops of electronics, and percussive splashes - filling the space where one may expect something larger.

I had been looking forward to this show. The second event within the year where the Exploratorium presented a legendary British band. Last was nearly a year ago, when the People Band performed a memorable show. Tonight's should prove to be as well. The first set was quiet - starting with Tilbury rubbing at the piano's keyboard cover and Prévost supplying a gentle response.

At times it was so quiet that a bottle cap dropping in the audience was almost as loud (no, it wasn't me). At the pause between sets, some audience members were restless, but the second set set everything right. Rowe's electronics played a bigger role, and at one point generated a drone that the others began sculpting around. (Rowe's gear is quite fascinating, as he has a small practice guitar neck attached to a Nintendo DS with custom software. I don't recall a laptop or too many other things with dials and knobs). As the set progressed, Tilbury's expertly picked notes and pendular chords gave motion to the electronic buzz, while Prévost's precisely arranged fills and pulses provide other textures. It was almost like you couldn't hear the trees for the forest, but what you did was unexpectedly vibrant and filled the room with a unique and minimal beauty.

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A little break

Greetings readers, just a note to say we're taking a little break, a breather, going fishing, etc. etc. See you all in a couple of days.

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Michel Doneda, Lê Quan Ninh - Thirty Ways to Avoid Talking (Relative Pitch, 2019) ****

By Keith Prosk

There are many working relationships lasting decades in this kind of music, but one that always springs to my mind is Michel Doneda (soprano saxophone) and Lê Quan Ninh (surrounded bass drum). They’ve recorded together for over three decades now, since the ‘80s, developed their deeply personal styles (often together) in the formative ‘90s, capstoned with two monumental solos in Ustensiles and Anatomie des clefs, and now it seems like everything the venerable duo touch, particularly together, is gold. Despite this perception of the duo, they’ve only recorded together alone on 2015’s Aplomb. Which is weird, considering some of Doneda’s other famous (though more recently founded) duos - with Pierre-Olivier Boulant, Jonas Kocher, Tetsu Saitoh, and Tatsuya Nakatani - are as well-recorded or more.

So this recording is a very welcome document of the duo. It follows Relative Pitch’s release of the solo Everybody Digs Michel Doneda in 2014. 49 minutes of live performance from 2017 are split across six tracks, but the last track was recorded separately from the rest and features Shunichiro Hisada (tzuzumi, voice), who’s recorded with Doneda on his Spring Road performances with Saitoh.

The sound is exactly what those familiar with the duo would expect. Lê works the drumhead with wood, metal, and flesh to evoke the wind and waves of a storm or bending and cracking wood or a warped brass orchestra and works the hoop and shell for skittering communicative pulses, with metallic chimes and clashes too, and sometimes big booming bass strikes, all of which can build into frenzies that sound impossible for two hands, or even 10 fingers, like the taiko-like climax of “The Smallest Sphenic Number.” Doneda draws attention to the saxophone as a vessel of air, with breathy, high-frequency whistles that give way to microtonal purrs and split tones, airy sine waves modulated by twisting with the saxophone or changing the speed of blowing. Sometimes there’s just breath. The saxophone never sounds like a saxophone, but more like a metallic shinobue or shawm. But Doneda is perhaps at his most lyrical here, on “Tricontagon” and the title track. And, though the duo is more comfortable with silence than most, there’s comparatively little silence here compared to some of their previous work. On the trio track, Shunichiro adds a taut-skinned pulse and “woos,” vocalizing the persona of the wooshing wind that Doneda harnesses and Lê at times mimics.

It’s exactly the scratch needed for a fan’s Doneda-Lê itch. As of now though, I don’t hear how this expands the vocabulary of or illuminates new pathways for the duo. An excellent record and an excellent companion to this year’s also excellent Doneda/percussion duo, A Peripheral Time, with
Mathieu Bec.

Thirty Ways to Avoid Talking is a CD-only release.

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Hermann Nitsch - Albertina Quartett (Trost, 2019) ****

By Eyal Hareuveni

Hermann Nitsch (born in 1938) is an Austrian, avant-garde multimedia artist, and known as the founder of the confrontational Viennese Actionism. His own total, large-scale and highly dramatic approach - encompassed as the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries - developed since the late fifties and is performed in variations through today. These theatrical-archaic performances call for all our senses. Often Nitsch would begin with painting, but soon his work would involve pagan-like, ritualistic performances, sometimes even including a sacrifice of livestock and splattering its blood and intestines on the paintings as well as on the naked bodies of the participants in these performances, alongside music that he composed and often played on the organ, and conclude with a feast.

Albertina Quartett, the premiere of Nitsch’s String Quartet No. 2 (in 6 movements for 2 violins, viola and cello, performed by the Koehne Quartet) was recorded on May 29th, 2019 in the Viennese Albertina museum and coincided with Nitsch’s retrospective exhibition in Albertina, Spaces of Color. The exhibition showed Nitsch’s paintings, which conquered walls in an overall manner, and intervening in spaces in the form of comprehensive installations. Albertina Quartett is the fourth album of Nitsch’s music released by the Viennese Trost label, beginning with Musik der 25. Aktion (2016), a re-performance of Nitsch’s 25th Aktion from 1968, recorded in March 1982 at the gallery Pakesch in Vienna.

Nitsch does not compose his music in a conventional notation, but divides the movements of his compositions into 1-minute segments and defines the sonic events with great precision - the duration, dynamics, actions with words and symbols, tone clusters and noise. The performing Koehne Quartet is comprised by female expats in Vienna - first violinist Joanna Lewis, second violinist Anne Harvey-Nagl, violist Lena Fankhauser and cellist Mara Achleitner.

The 90-minutes of the String Quartet No. 2 are divided to six extended movements, all titles as ‘Satz’, lack the theatrical, ecstatic drama of Nitsch’s orgies, but offer a unique, minimalist. drone-like experience. These first two movements provide an out-of-time, hypnotic, unison kind of statsis, delivered with a sensual and highly expressive intensity. The third, shortest movement changes the course to more tense, confrontational dynamics but the fourth movements deepens again into the hypnotic, unison kind of lyrical, minimalist stasis. The fifth movement, “Sats (Krebs-Landler) 15’” is the most exceptional one. Nitsch mocks the legacy of Viennese dances and composes a cacophonous blend of twisted waltzes that sounds as imposing the dancers to keep bumping and colliding with each other, but with passionate doses of lust. This composition concludes majestically with another minimalist drone, beautiful and sensual and leaves you in an untimely dream state of mind.

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Two from Daniel Studer

By Nick Ostrum

Daniel Studer – Extended For Strings & Piano (ezz-thetics, 2019) ****

I am a recent convert to Daniel Studer’s work. I actually gained my first exposure him only recently, in his Leo Records release with Gabriela Friedli and Dieter Ulrich (which, to correct the record, included tracks composed by Studer as well as Friedli). Since then, I have had the pleasure to work through two of his newest releases.

Extend For Strings and Piano consists of Harald Kimmig on violin, Frantz Loriot on viola, Alfred Zimmerlin on violoncello, Philip Zoubek on piano, and Studer himself on double bass and compositions. This is a moderately-sized ensemble working the full range of their instruments (read: extended techniques and percussive, grating strings) and with great discipline and restraint. Logical connections can be drawn to the Another Timbre and Creative Sources scenes. Nevertheless, Studer and co. take their amelodic, frequently minimalist tendencies in a somewhat different direction. Dynamics play a major role in this music, as scrapes, saws, and strikes arise almost organically out of silence, only to fade just as abruptly. The tracks cohere, but focus is placed on each piece as an atemporal, non-progressive whole, sans the slow welling and layering of sound that Rodrigues and his circles frequently explore. There is a fragility, subtlety, and deep pensiveness to the performances on this album. Brief successions of notes and resonances waft in and out of the three “Bagatelle” tracks in particular. In “motus,” the strings energize and stumble over each other evoking the more delicate tendencies of the horror vacuui school of contemporary composition.

Even so, this is not just heady, theoretical music. As Brian Morton point out in his liner notes, this is in part a return to the very roots of jazz, even before Sydney Bechet and others made it wind music: “The early ‘jazz’ groups were string ensembles, employed to entertain rich men but free after hours to explore their instruments, their tools, without restraint.” As long as we consider this “restraint” as externally imposed, rather than as self-control, self-restraint, and technique which exist dialectically with freedom and exploration (Morton’s notes invite this dialectic by invoking Marx), this point is quite apropos. This is not traditional jazz in any sense of the term. Yet, it harkens back to the curiosity that inspired those early experiments into the turn of the 19^th century’s “new music,” the quest for novel sounds, timbres, and musical space. This string sextet is far from alone in this pursuit. That fact, however, makes the peculiarities of this album all the more important.

Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey with Jürg Frey and Alfred Zimmerlin – Zeit (Leo Records, 2019) ****½

Keith Prosk wrote an excellent review of another recent Studer release, Zeit, a few months ago and I have no intention to simply reiterate what he so keenly characterized as the wandering “bassscape(s)” and enthralling electro-acoustic “amassing” and release of tension. For what it is worth, however, I would like to posit this album as a point of comparison to better understand the course of Studer’s current musical thinking.

Zeit is a collection of recordings from 2004, 2007, and 2018 worked quite convincingly into a cohesive album. Unlike Extended recorded by one ensemble over the course of one day, therefore, Zeit is a document of extended process, practice and selection. It balances the acoustic – that early jazz rootedness - with the electro-acoustic; it contrasts and combines studies in bass sonorities and contending rhythms with more rounded explorations of quartet (bass-bass-violoncello-clarinet) dynamics absent even the possibility of interplay. (The four tracks including Jürg Frey and Zimmerlin required the participating musicians be isolated from each other for the duration of the performance.) The sound is more developed and refined than that on Extended and, conceptually, it might even more progressive. That said, the relative fullness of Zeit helped me better sense of the controlled sparseness and sharp discordance of Extended, and vice versa. In his liner notes, Giancarlo Schiaffini identifies a strand of “dynamic minimalism” that underlies Zeit. Similar impulses fuel Extended, which, with its experimental, almost Bauhaus-level functionalism seems an excavation of these same “dynamic minimalist” undercurrents. Extended takes the bare, acoustic, atavistic approach. Zeit meanwhile deploys a wider range of instruments, techniques, sonic manipulations, and conceptual deviations. It nevertheless pursues the same goal: excavating and mapping a small piece of the immense musical ground that has opened between the first improvisations of early jazz and the contemporary world of composition. It is a goal, of course, that can only ever be achieved in fragments. These albums show, however, the pursuit is nevertheless well worth the effort.

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Ellen Arkbro - CHORDS (Subtext, 2019) ****

By Keith Prosk

Ellen Arkbro gifts two compositions lasting half an hour on CHORDS . Whereas the sublime For Organ and Brass featured the familiar trio of Elena Kakaliagou, Hilary Jeffery, and Robin Hayward alongside organist Johan Graden, Arkbro performs her own compositions here, alone, on organ and guitar. She continues to plumb the depths of tonal, timbral, and harmonic aspects of instruments - with jarring singularity - and an emphasis on space over time. The result can be surreal.

“CHORDS for organ” begins with a chord, on an organ. After some time, there’s another chord. And that’s it. Surficially. Focus reveals the many sonic lines comprising each chord. Held and allowed to decay, the lines pulse and throb like diffracted air in heat. The waves seem to resonate and harmonize with each other, creating new timbres. When another chord sounds, the waves also amplify and accelerate and the various lines at various pulses create a kind of polyrhythm. The glacial pace of sounding between chords eliminates any sense of forward movement, of musical time, and the track instead feels like a framed space. The effect is similar to watching fireworks in slow motion: a void illuminated by expanding spheres of color in fact composed of squiggling lines that blend with other bursting spheres of color, like Kandinsky’s Several Circles in three dimensions, briefly, before fading completely.

“CHORDS for guitar” contains a similar macrostructure but, whereas the tones of organ chords are pressed almost simultaneously, the tones of guitar chords are strummed more discretely, particularly at the pace of Arkbro’s performance. And whereas chords can sound simultaneously on an organ, the guitar is more limited. The identity of each chord is apparent when first strummed but disintegrates to its individual parts in time, and a kind of hyperawareness of sound waves sets in as high-frequency tones peel away and low-frequency tones hum along, creating a trancelike pulse through the track. Arkbro’s attack is often as consistent as a harpsichord but occasionally, subtly emphasizes the bass or the tenor ends. The timbre is reminiscent of This Heat’s spindly sound. The effect feels more linear, more austere, and perhaps less immediately appealing than “CHORDS for organ” but is cognitively pleasing as a kind of simultaneous foil and companion to it.

CHORDS revels in the details of timbre and is suggested for listeners that do the same. With a simple approach and a slow pace, Arkbro brings focus to intrainstrumental dynamics in a way that makes these chords scale within and beyond what they are. A kind of enlightened understanding of the forest gained from wandering among the trees.

CHORDS is available digitally, on CD, and on LP.

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Larry Ochs/Nels Cline/Gerald Cleaver – What Is To Be Done (Clean Feed, 2019) ***½

By Troy Dostert

When three high-caliber musicians meet for the first time as a trio—and they have resumes the likes of Larry Ochs, Nels Cline and Gerald Cleaver—there’s sure to be some avid interest, and in this case there’s added significance in that this release represents the 500^th album brought forth by the venerable Clean Feed label. But as with all free-improvisational outings, sometimes the results aren’t quite sufficient to meet the lofty expectations. Even the record’s ambigauous title, What Is To Be Done, which could either be viewed as a declaration or an open-ended question, is a hint, perhaps, that the music here hasn’t quite found its purpose, despite the episodic moments of magic that do appear.

These guys aren’t strangers to one another. Cline brought his electric guitar wizardry to saxophonist Ochs’s magisterial Electric Ascension Live, a vital revisiting of Coltrane’s landmark Ascension recording, while Cleaver and Ochs recently teamed up on Songs of the Wild Cave (Rogue Art, 2018), a drums-sax duo album. Here the three come together for three improvisations: two lengthy ones at over twenty minutes each, with a shorter six-minute piece, “A Pause, a Rose” sandwiched in between.

It’s clear from the outset that the trio is on a mission to rock out. Anyone familiar with Cleaver’s output knows that he can bring the goods when it comes to a fearsome rocking intensity—witness the Black Host’s Life in the Sugar Candle Mines for evidence. But here it’s even more pronounced, with Cleaver offering a shifting series of steady, granite-solid rhythms designed to instigate and support the contributions of Cline and Ochs. From the opening moments of the first track, “Outcries Rousing,” one can appreciate Cleaver’s ability to establish a deep groove while Ochs joins in with some bluesy figures. Cline too offers chunky riffs to nice effect before dropping out to let Ochs and Cleaver do their thing for a while. And that’s all to the good, until Cline comes back in—and that might be the first sign of trouble, as Cline starts to bring a heavier, grittier sound from that point onward, and Ochs seems to start to lose his place in the conversation. Which is not to say that Cline is not terrific: the bag of tricks he’s able to bring to bear throughout the album is at times astonishing. His looping technique alone is a marvel, at times suggesting the presence of two different guitarists. But it’s not always commodious enough to make room for Ochs in the way that one would like, especially once Cleaver and Cline go into overdrive mode, as they frequently do on the record. Ochs, to his credit, does his best to find his footing, and he’s not shy about jumping into the fray. He offers plenty of feisty energy himself. But that isn’t quite enough to make the music a true three-way conversation.

Part of the problem lies in the mixing of the album. Rather than situate the three musicians in clear distinction across the listening field, Cline and Ochs are put together very closely in the center, with Cleaver spread out over the left, center and right channels. This blurs the differences between the players, making it even harder to hear the music as an exchange of ideas. Moreover, when Cline really brings the heat, as happens midway through “Outcries Rousing” and elsewhere, Ochs is in danger of being subsumed beneath Cline’s distorted onslaught. More openness and equity in the mix all around would have helped a great deal.

Ironically, it’s on the shortest track, “A Pause, a Rose,” where the potential of the trio is suggested most enticingly. As Cline begins with some entrancing figures that loop and wind around each other, Cleaver waits until just the right moment to enter with some delicate cymbal work, leading Ochs also to contribute with some felicitous flurries and cries. And when Cleaver does eventually find the groove that drives the rest of the track, the trio’s chemistry is enhanced rather than buried beneath the rhythm. There are other moments of a similar nature at various points on the album; for instance, the closing minutes of “Outcries” are riveting, as Ochs merges beautifully with Cline’s looping filigrees to create a captivating conclusion to the track. But nuances tend to be in short supply on the closer, “Shimmer Intend Spark Groove Defend,” where Cline’s outsized presence once again comes to dominate the proceedings, Ochs’s heroic efforts to keep up notwithstanding. Here too, a bit more subtlety and balance might have gone a long way.

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Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark - Invitation To A Dream (Astral Spirits, 2019) ****

By Keith Prosk

Invitation To A Dream is the first recorded meeting of Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar), Joe McPhee (soprano saxophone and pocket trumpet), and Ken Vandermark (tenor saxophone and clarinet) as a trio. Alcorn and McPhee recorded together on the masterstroke Concentration. And McPhee and Vandermark have recorded together frequently since the late ‘90s, perhaps most famously as part of Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet, and just recently with this year’s The Fire Each Time. But this is the first time Alcorn and Vandermark have recorded together. The results are almost as stirring as the three names on the marquee would have you believe.

This studio session, from September 2017, occurred the same week as the trio’s first live performance. The macrostructure of these seven tracks, which span 49 minutes, appears to reflect the scouting phase of their interplay. Four longer tracks explore the possible combinations between McPhee and Vandermark: (1) tenor/trumpet; (2) clarinet/soprano; (4) tenor/soprano; (5) clarinet/trumpet. Three shorter tracks explore the possible combinations of duos: (3) Alcorn/Vandermark; (6) Alcorn/McPhee; (7) McPhee/Vandermark. And these shorter tracks rotate through McPhee and Vandermark’s instruments as well: (3) pedal steel/tenor; (6) pedal steel/soprano; (7) clarinet/trumpet. Alcorn almost acts like an anchor in most tracks, with the most play time, as if McPhee and Vandermark give more ear than mouth to better incorporate the most unfamiliar member of the trio. All of this serves to create a feeling of deliberate development in the trio’s dialect.

But the familiar styles of these musicians is here. Vandermark’s tenor staccato stops, slaps, and clicks interspersed with resonant, sonorous swells; his nimble, pastoral clarinet. McPhee’s alternately gnarled, skronky or soulful and lyrical soprano; the Cherry flurries and breathy blusters of his pocket trumpet sowed with voicings like Michelangelo’s slaves writhing in pain as they’re entombed by the gorgon. Alcorn’s tones stretched like taffy and peppered with twinkling melodies, reverbed riffs, apocalyptic arpeggios, something that sounds like a tape machine. The pacing is often relaxed, with Vandermark and McPhee giving Alcorn and each other a lot of space, resulting in what can feel less like communication with each other than contribution to the atmosphere. The experience is dreamlike or collaged. Languorous until awakened, or realizing the dream is nightmarish.

It’s a strong trio performance with strong individual performances. I imagine I’ll be drawn to return to it for quite some time. But there is a feeling that each musician has ascended higher before. There’s aspects of these musician’s characteristic energy, soul, and cerebralness that feel incomplete here. I hope they continue to perform and record together, and I look forward to a less deliberate exploration of their dynamics and a more natural channeling of their growing relationship.

Invitation To A Dream is available digitally, on CD, and on LP.

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Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark - Invitation To A Dream (Astral Spirits, 2019) *****

By Eyal Hareuveni

Clouded reflections

Broken dreams

Nightmare creatures

Flying

(First verse of Joe McPhee’s poem “Less Than Zero”)

Some matches are made in heaven and can be brought to a studio in Austin, Texas. Baltimore-based pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, Poughkeepsie-based sax and pocket trumpet player Joe McPhee, and Chicagoan reeds player Ken Vandermark player is, no doubt, one of these rare matches.

Alcorn and McPhee performed for the first time at the 2016 edition of the Cropped Out Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. A year later, both were invited by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who has collaborated many times before with McPhee, with The thing and in duo performances and recordings) to his Austin’s Sonic Transmission festival, but this time with Vandermark. McPhee and Vandermark have been collaborating together for more than twenty years now, since they recorded their first album together, A Meeting in Chicago (Okka Disk, 1998, with Kent Kessler) in February 1996, and most recently with the release of the box-set of the DKV trio with McPhee, The Fire Each Time (Not Two, 2019). The recording of Invitation To A Dream, which took place in September 2017, was the first time that Alcorn, McPhee and Vandermark played together as trio.

McPhee’s decision to bring to the recording session the soprano sax, instead of the often-used tenor sax, in addition to his pocket trumpet, set the chamber, poetic atmosphere of Invitation To A Dream. Vandermark left out his baritone sax and focused on the tenor sax and clarinet. Alcorn, McPhee and Vandermark created instantly a strong and coherent sound, dynamic, and identity for this trio. You can feel this kind of disarming magic already on opening, title-piece, the first piece that the trio played, with no warm up improvisations, no false starts, just the most profound, spiritual music.

You sense immediately that the trio hardly had to rely on rhythmic patterns at all and opted for reserved, abstract dynamics and not for dramatic, energetic ones (except on the short “Rise and Rise”). These kind of European, abstract, free-associative improvisations are based on deep listening and openly emotional and imaginative sculpting and shaping of sounds. Often, the conversational-contemplative interplay extends and expands on fleeting themes and ideas but refuses again and again to attach itself to any of them. It may sound like a recipe for a chaotic, off-balanced structural turmoil, but Alcorn, McPhee and Vandermark are experienced enough to allow this unpredictable tension and architecture feed and invigorate their music, letting these dreamy-cryptic events just happen and suggest their own inner logic and reasoning. The longer pieces as “Bing Says Ming” and “The Eyes of Memory” captures best the trio essence (and even their titles make perfect sense while listening to them).

How could this happen

What does it mean

Empty echoes

Fading

(Second verse of McPhee’s poem that accompanies this album)

One of the best albums of 2019, and happened to be the 100th release of the independent Astral Spirits label. You should get your own copy of the limited-edition vinyl with artwork by Bill Nace.

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Ben Bennett/Zach Darrup/Jack Wright – Never (Palliative records, 2019) *****

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos 

Sometimes we need to make things clear from the beginning and state our point of view. This is an amazing recording from three fine improvisers. Nothing less than five stars and I mean it. You all know by now about the great musician and thinker Jack Wright. Wright, who on Never plays saxophone, is always the artist willing to collaborate on an equal basis with musicians of younger generations. Here he plays with two low key improvisers. Ben Bennett on the drums and percussion has not seen so much publicity around his name, even though he fully deserves it. He manages to be an artist in demand from many below the radar collaborations, like a duo we recently reviewed here with Arrington De Dionyso. Zach Darrup has played together with both of the aforementioned musicians in duos. These are some fine recordings as well, while I cannot say I’ve listened to anything else from him.

The fact that they know each other and have built a communicative language really shows on Never. Their interaction is impeccable. Especially since Wright’s work through the years isn’t one that needs categorization, but as a reference point here would be European improvisation of the freest form from the early 70’s. It is very rare that you come close to such a dedicated interaction between musicians. They seem willing and eager to leave any trace of ego or willing for a personal exploration through the journey to uncharted waters that is collective improvisation.

Darrup’s gentle plucking, fingering and use of electricity proves an adequate equivalent for the low volume sax attack of Wright’s phrases. It is very easy to get lost under the power of electricity when you mates are playing acoustically, but Darrup never ceases to amaze with the balance he finds. It might seem as an antithesis but many times I found myself considering Bennett’s percussion work along with Wright’s sax as a duo within this trio. They seem that they play in unison, one mind behind two instruments…

From the very beginning up to the last second, more than hour later, Never impresses. They never ran out of ideas, they keep the energy flow really high, they never bore you even if you have listened a billion of improvisational recordings. The five star rating is no exaggeration, so all of you reading the above lines, go buy it.

@koultouranafigo

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