Crump,Stephan / Laubrock,Ingrid - Channels - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sylvie Courvoisier presents a new trio album at the height of her mastery and success. InchFree HoopsInch follows the widely celebrated trio album InchD'AgalaInch which The New York Times counted as among the best records of the year. With every concert and every album this glorious trio's modus operandi becomes more clear - Sylvie Courvoisier, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen play morphing music by turns intricately detailed and ambiguously wide open. The music Courvoisier writes is rigorously organized and calls for ensemble precision, as a few thorny unisono heads demonstrate. But the music also harbors a misterioso, dreamlike quality that may surface at any time, induced by a wistful ostinato or moonlit piano arpeggio stubbornly repeated, or by a quiet episode that underscores the depth of the trio's sonic space. They also do that good stuff we prize jazz for - the happy swinging, the coming together when they make complex material sing, and the flying apart when the players explore it on their own.

Saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock is at the center of today's Brooklyn avant-garde, and over the past decade has steadily expanded her reach as a composer, devising new ways to inspire, organize, and situate improvised music. Monochromes marks a new chapter in her oeuvre, as she has written and designed richly detailed fixed-media works as a starting point for improvisations. InchIn early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down, she began to record the sonic materials that would serve as the fixed media in the piece. Laubrock asked a handful of close collaborators to realize her scores, which mix conventional and graphic notation with text instructions. In each of the four sections of the uninterrupted work (or monochromes), seriously kinetic, shape-shifting tape pieces unfurl, giving a set of additional improvisers an often unpredictable sonic provocationInch. With Monochromes, Ingrid Laubrock presents an artistic statement that reflects the turbulence of an age gone off the rails.

Stephan Crump - Asteroidea [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/20/2017