The second volume of New York/Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman's 6-part series "The Art of the Improv Trio" is the most unique of the set, with Mat Maneri on viola and Whit Dickey on drums for a series of thirteen shorter and more intricate works of great range and diversity.
Label: Leo Records Catalog ID: LEO 772 Squidco Product Code: 23310
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2016 Country: UK Packaging: Jewel Case Recorded Parkwest Studios, in Brooklyn, New York, in August, 2015, by Jim Clouse.
"Matt Maneri: "Ivo and I met much later: smooth, confidant and excellent. But Original! Where do these people come from? What is Ivo? He is a committed musician of the highest caliber, ready to go off the rails, crash the car, and explode my expectations. He is a master who does what he does, will do what he can and finalize the infinite. This CD, as every CD in this series, is accompanied by the brilliant notes by Neil Tesset, as well as Matt Maneri."-Leo
"This is only album in the series not to feature Gerald Cleaver: instead we have Whit Dickey on drums, joining Mat Maneri, viola. As with all the trios, these are musicians with whom Perelman is familiar, from a pool on which he's drawn during his creative surge of the last five years.
Previous sessions featuring Perelman and Maneri have generated an intricate and lucidly woven fabric - complimentary contours always expanding. On this occasion, the tendency is in the other direction, considering what can be done on a more elemental level by focusing on how it's put together - its interior nature - in a collection of relatively brief studies. The basic material is parsed, dissected and rearranged, internal relations reconfigured, and the new segments linked then separated afresh, all marked by fleeting changes in register, intonation and phrasing. It seems as if there's continual variation, yet in each piece the building blocks remain the same, in music that forgoes linear progression. This process is not a formal but poetic, analysis - explorations akin to Gerard Manley Hopkins' "inscape" of things, lying out of normal sight and only revealed by taking a different approach. It's not a rigid template, however. To a certain extent the trio go where their instincts take them, part of the art of improv.
As always with Perelman, brevity and restrictions are no bar to variety. The thirteen pieces have a range of paces, each unfolding in a manner that suits the treatment adopted. There's no single way to go about this. Sometimes things are clear - more accurately, set in higher relief - other times they're more dispersed and ambiguous. Likewise with texture and tempo: the viola's serrated edge and the warm, occasionally sour saxophone, smeared and wavering tones; widely spaced notes and closely packed clusters, with oscillations generated by identical and adjacent pitches producing phantom notes; steady speeds and accelerating figures but also passages where shape rather than pulse govern direction. At one point, Perelman and Maneri indulge in a mutual chuckle. The melody instruments drift over the delicate lacework of Dickey's strokes, swirls and seething cymbals. Elsewhere, his brusque drumming incites further fragmentation. He's the usual steady pair of hands (and feet).
Of course, an interesting notion does not necessarily make for a good album (in fairness, the way I've expounded it may not be universally acknowledged). Perelman and his colleagues have mastered a complex and subtle expressive language - a group of sympathetic and mutually articulate musicians - who also recognise the need to inject fresh ideas and consider matters anew, to remain stimulated and avoid staleness, though I suspect such things are never discussed in detail as they have a remarkable intuitive consensus on how they approach each album. There's no reason to think that they will not continue to produce engaging music for the foreseeable future, though fully appreciating the depth and range of their work might take a little longer."-Colin Green, The Free Jazz Collective