Watts, Trevor & Veryan Weston

5 More Dialogues

Label: Emanem Country: UK

"Here are two men whose musical natures are obviously rich and their backgrounds complex - back to Stinky Winkles in the pianist's case, back to Amalgam and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the saxophonist's - but who reduce, in the critic/analyst's shorthand, to tiling or fabric. Tessellations. Moiré. Does that convey all you need to know about Veryan Weston and Trevor Watts, secure in the understanding that these are self-chosen metaphors, not imposed from outside? Needless to say, no, but it's worth thinking what the respective imagery conveys: a sense of interlocking pattern, repetition, system, logic, an Apollonian veering toward order on the one side; a shifting, shimmering, never-the-same-twice movement on the other. Hard surfaces and single notes. Liquid movement, everything blurred together. Piano. Saxophone.

That would do, but as the music contained here immediately and repeatedly confirms, the verbal equivalences never quite work and never have. Watts's sense of order, of structured improvisation and almost fractal form has always been very highly developed, and Weston frequently intersperses passages of almost algebraic directness with vast clouds - clusters is too bitty a word - of sonic material.

These are men who have strongly established life-scripts, or personal 'styles'. It is impossible to mistake Trevor Watts for any other saxophonist, and even more remarkably, given the nature of his instrument, Veryan Weston for any other piano player. They are deeply imprinted, but they are also decisive and free, and they are capable of command, fruitful antagonism and playful 'pastimes', moments where the interplay between them is cheerfully emptied of any graspable signification. If that sounds as if small talk has been elevated into art, that may well be it, because here are two musicians who almost uniquely manage to resist verbal corralling. They are what they are because they are what they play, and they play like that because of what they are, which is defined by how they play. It is strangely but rightly difficult after a time to determine who is proposing what, who is leading and who responding, who is advancing a position and who is subverting it."-Brian Morton, from the liner notes