Lowell Davidson was a graduate student in biochemistry at Harvard when, on the recommendation of Ornette Coleman, he recorded his first and only album for Bernard Stollman's ESP label without so much as an audition. He is ably aided by bassist Gary Peacock and percussionist Milford Graves, and while it's not clear whether or not the trio had been together for very long, they do sound quite cohesive. Davidson's compositions are largely made up of long strings of melody broken by short pauses, but unlike Cecil Taylor, whose motifs are often repeated and fractured, the lines here tend to run on into long developments. "Stately 1" begins in an atmospheric melancholy feeling with triplets against the sparse melody. Graves and Peacock add to the spacey qualities of the track, leaving a lot of room for Davidson. Eventually the piano lines become a bit more fractured and the "rhythm section" a bit more insistent. "Dunce" features a series of falling melodic fragments that circle around Peacock's bass drone as Prof. Graves pokes and prods with quick drum rolls and abrupt stops.

"Ad Hoc" is the longest track, a quick statement of a short theme before the stop/start modus apparent on the other tunes begins. There are similarities to Taylor's playing � the fleetness, the hard percussive attack � but it's difficult to tell if Davidson was really influenced by Taylor or not. His pieces don't build up into the torrents of sound that Taylor's do, more often stacking run alongside run until they run their course. In an on-line article about Davidson, it is stated that he believed that combinations of tones and rhythms could influence the evolution of the brain, so perhaps there is more influence from that line of thought than from any one individual contemporary pianist.

The recording itself sounds good considering its age, with the bass and drums just a tad muffled. I suspect that this may be due more to their relative pitches than any lack of skill on the engineer's part. All in all, a fascinating glimpse of an original player and composer. The liner notes mention that Davidson played performances in Boston that were recorded, and ESP is attempting to find and releases these recordings. I hope it happens.