“Sometimes it’s dumb fun to think up impossible supergrouops. Maybe they help you imagine a sound you’ve never considered, a combination of histories and vectors that contradicts those that might be steered by normal forces, such as geography or genre or circle of colleagues. A parlor game designed to transcend time and place.Here’s one: John Carter, Bernard Parmegiani, Mike Ratledge and Tony Williams. Think of the possibilities, Ratledge offers fudgy bass keyboards, circa 1970, Soft Machine’s Third, while Williams alternately takes to the breeze with a swift swinging ride or breaks things up restructurally, a wooden metronome or one-man marching band. On clarinet, Carter gulps and whorls his way into an appealing alternate temporal-spatial framework, the one occupied and charted by Parmegiani, who, from the INA-GRM soundboard dubs the proceedings into electroacoustic ladyland. I’d love to hear it: free-prog-jazz-concrete.In this case, the dream group’s inspiration came the other direction, rather than imagining something fictional, from listening to Hearts and Minds. Not to suggest that they sound like an additive experiment in mix-and-matchery, quite the contrary, they’re a singularly original unit. But unusual forces are at play, unique combinatorics, suggesting a confluence of ideas, newly directed teleologies, a turbulent eddy in the natural flow of creative music’s waterway.The collective’s eponymous debut emanates from an eight year incubation, sporadic and occasionally intensive gigging resulting in the accretion of a songbook, featuring tunes and structures divided about equally between the bass-clarinetist Jason Stein and keyboardist and synthesizer player Paul Giallorenzo. Stein and Giallorenzo...
MP3 $8.91
10/07/2016
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10/07/2016