Prevost, Eddie / Wilkinson, Alan

So Are We, So Are We

Label: Matchless Country: UK

"[...] The music Eddie Prévost and Alan Wilkinson are making here is neither extreme, nor ambiguous, nor is it self-consciously convoluted. Indeed, in comparison to much of what passes muster as commercial music, it is devastatingly straightforward and approachable. But it constantly allows for the possibility of other states. It trembles with potential, and thus never exhausts its unequivocal possibilities.

Almost every artistic form, whether it is the five act tragedy or the string quartet, has one work which ranges across it like the Great Wall of China, magnificent but also an obstacle to those who presume to follow. Hamlet or King Lear might serve in the first case; one of the late Beethoven opus numbers in the latter. By the same token it is hard to think of an album of saxophone and percussion duos without thinking of John Coltrane's and Rashied Ali's Interstellar Space. It is a magnificent piece of music, and a constant challenge to those who have followed. But it also acts as a barrier, not necessarily to musicians, certainly to those who listen to and cherish music. Coltrane's late opus numbers were the product of a spiritual quest that seemed tinged with a Faustian urge to know everything. The association with Ali took him out beyond the basic time-codes of jazz, then Western music, then any other systematised metrical language.

To some extent, without in any way explicitly addressing Interstellar Space Prévost and Wilkinson have responded to it by bringing their language back into a human realm, to a space in which the specifics of making a particular sound at a particular moment is more important than the metaphysical import of those sounds, and to the excluded middle of what can only be called "ethical" music-making. That is not to say, music with a moral function or conclusion, but rather music that addressed itself to the fundamental ethical question, which is how we address each other, how we communicate needs, desires, concerns and ambitions, and how we make that language available to others as an ongoing discourse."-Brian Morton, from the liner notes