For its first two releases, Squidco's brand new in-house digital label, Squid Note Records, has released two of the latest installments in Joel Futterman's growing solo piano oeuvre. Below is a review of the second, Reflective.

The solo piano session is nothing new to Joel Futterman. He has been at it for over four decades, now, and has recorded scores of these performances. Often, they take place in studio, or in house: no publicity build-up, no audience, and no script. According to the pianist, it has been decades since he has written music and instead has fully embraced a practiced and disciplined approach to spontaneous composition.

Unlike his longer works (see Absorb), Reflective showcased 19 primarily short thematic sketches, almost etudes without the implication that they are to be repeated, recorded over a few weeks in the early spring. Each one captures a ballad, or sprint, but singular statement, though laden with myriad twists, turns, contortions, halts and flourishes within that statement. In a sense, these are sonnets, composed and performed simultaneously, capturing a moment, a mood, a transient thought. And in that, they are especially effective.

Futterman deploys romantic motifs, and laggard strides, chaotic percussive clanks, bebop punctuation, baroque fixtures, colloquial clunk. Together, these pieces create a collection that could be a musical corollary to Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, works that embrace both the traditional order and contemporary disjunction with equal reverence, that reference recognizable forms but deploy them in an idiom — sometimes elevated, sometimes common — that are instantiations of a unique moment constructed out of the setting and ambiance, the pianist's mood and flow of his thoughts, the precise array of notes that came before and the evolving intentions of what is to come after.

That brings us to the core of Futterman's musical practice: time. Futterman insists time is an illusion, a human perception and ordering that may be necessary but is also not absolute. And, if it is not absolute, it can be stretched, condensed, suspended, shaped, and reshaped in multiple directions and repeatedly. Each intrusion in turn transforms the potential for the next moment. And so on. Reflective might be best understood as a selection of some of the choicest of the those manipulated moments and evidence of the profound potential of each instant of musical time, when shaped by the proper hands.