Does sound dance? Of course it does! And if anyone knows about these matters, it's Muhal Richard Abrams. In his eighty-plus years on planet Earth, Abrams has traveled a jazz path that includes teaching himself music from books, playing with luminaries such as Dexter Gordon and Eddie Harris, and cofounding the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the most innovative musical entities in — well, the world.
SoundDance is a glorious two-CD set that features Abrams at two AACM concerts, one in 2009 with the legendary and much-missed sax legend Fred Anderson, and one in 2010 with trombonist and laptop maestro George Lewis. Both pieces are fully improvised, and both showcase Abrams's tremendous musical and intellectual gifts.
Disc 1, called "Focus, ThruTime. . . Time->," is the first recording of Abrams and Anderson together, and possibly the last recording of Anderson, who died in 2010. The piece starts out with interludes of silence as the two masters ease into the open space ahead. As their conversation begins to take flight, sounds rise up and leap together, forming delightfully unpredictable melody lines, as well as squawks and squiggles and other pieces of sound. Abrams's strong, emotive playing combined with Anderson's rich tone and thoughtful lacework creates a splendid musical flowering, and the result is a pure pleasure to behold.
Disc 2, called "SoundDance," is also full of delicious sounds. Lewis, who is one of the pioneers of computer music, tosses out sniglets and blipazoids and all manner of sonic mischief. Abrams responds in kind, meeting the electronics through blending, questioning, and on occasion, old-fashioned sass. When Lewis switches from laptop to trombone, there's not much difference: he's a tremendously inventive and facile player, and his trombone produces a host of captivating shapes, including something that resembles the sound of adults speaking in Charlie Brown cartoons. The two players ride the edge between music and noise, and enter the land where there's really no distinction at all.
So many of the great improvised-music organizations of the sixties and seventies are no longer with us, but SoundDance testifies to AACM's enduring vibrancy. This is superb music, cohesive and satisfying and mind-expanding, a dance of sounds featuring one of our greatest living masters.
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