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Each solo, pairing, or collective development brings with it mood swings, but the performance taken as a whole flows as a series of united processes, including the final cut with electronics merged into the mix. The musicians expound in their own unique language, but the communication is immediate and the message conceptually understood and cognitively processed by each of them. Barker, Shipp, and Waters generate demanding music with a welcome and satisfying degree of originality.

All About Jazz

This collaborative trio brings all three back the freer terrain, after the more focused, semi-composed efforts of their other bands. Each piece on this release is entitled "invention" with a part number. Variations on a theme which continually spin and swirl and connect in different ways, often swimming through turbulent currents, yet occasionally slow down and open up to more tentative moments. The piano and drums often shadow each other as the clarinet or alto sax bend notes, fly, erupt or peek through the haze. Each member of the trio take turns to steer the rapids, all three listen well and take their time to push the direction or add their spice to the stew. All three get a solo interlude which show their personnel prowess and still connect with the ongoing story. They all are reach deep into the well to and spew out them powerful out barbed explosives as well. The liner notes include wise words from William Parker, Olivier Messiaen and Divini Cultus, which add the mystery and magic to mix. The final "Invention" is a remix where Shannon Fields adds some strange electronic effects to the trio's already twisted sound and an aura of ghost-like spirits floats in on a haze. This mysterious, somber closing bendiction brings things back down to a more restrained conclusion.

Dowtown Music Gallery

The conceptual density of the recording is awe-inspiring. It provides an emotional sensibility to chew on, to seize with exuberance. The apostles in the tradition of the Bible were sanctioned by Christ to carry His word. In a corresponding metaphor, this beautifully molded trio carries the word of all its predecessors in terms of its musical statement and, then, becomes the bearer of the word as is exemplified by the coda, which is the last track.

The tracks on the CD are named in seemingly non-sensical permutations of the number three to list “inventions” on the recording. The term ‘invention’ stems from J.S. Bach, who used it to describe the keyboard pieces he wrote to teach his children. The structure of Bach’s short works are single lines, each played where the hands operate individually. The genius of the works is that the independent lines develop into one melody.

These three instrumentalists improvise independently and co-dependently as is the skin and bones of the performance art. The lines move in and out of each other as would passers-by on the street ofttimes recognize each other and stop to intersect, move away from each other in opposite directions, move close to each other, slide by each other, become distant from one another, or one on top of another, back to back, front to front. The sound is contrapuntal, only slightly melodic at any one point. The music is tragic, wrenching, peaceful, unanalyzable.

Barker, the drummer, breaks a torrential first two inventions where the bass drum constantly reminds the listener of a tumultuous stream, with an abstractly rhythmic third cut. The mallet struck toms predominate, evolving into a set of brushed edges, a bowed cymbal accenting the beginning and the end. This drum cut provides a segue between Waters’ clarinet’s agonizing cries to the introduction of the alto’s more middle-range sound, which in turn gives entrance to the piano’s strongly hammered note progressions. The alto hovers in a steady orbit. The drums later joined by the piano paint a solid base on which the alto can land and from which it can take off. The clarinet comes back in to close the series of improvisations with much the same rapidity as it had played in the beginning.

Shipp opens the recording fading in with muscularly pointed repeated phrasings. Thereafter, the quality of his playing never wanes. His rhythmic mode rises and falls in runs up and down the keyboard; the unmistakably invaluable chord walls chain the listener to the seriousness of the music. Any solo tangent reveals Shipp’s unremitting relentless fervor for the keys. They are the extension of his particular mind-set, one that is extraordinarily imbued with culture and the world and desirous of altering the perception of the same through music.

The "New Testament" paradigm for a world view completes this recording. The mode is a remix of acoustics from the drums and the clarinet (and how about a set of lilting, melancholic, sounds-like, harmonica phrases), with electronic scrapes & reverberations and piano ostinatos. This is the music that follows what came before it in the largest sense. This is the music that incorporates the use of tools not available when Bach wrote. This is the point where all musics within this recording’s defined set of limits are shaped into a 21st century invention of how melodic lines can merge as one. One adamant, sacred, spiritual, art-is-life determination.

jazzreview.com

Lyn Horton

New Music Report
March 10, 2003

Tad Hendrickson