An archival recording from the Kraine Art Gallery in NYC in October of 1987 by French horn player Vincent Chancey, double bassist Wilber Morris and percussionist Warren Smith, their distinctive instrumentation revealing the passionate dialog of agile and commanding ability, balancing the innate lyricism of jazz traditions with the liberation of free & out playing.
Format: LP Condition: New Released: 2020 Country: Lithuania Packaging: LP Recorded live at the Kraine Art Gallery, in New York City, New York, on October 21st, 1987.
"The trio format of wind instrument, double bass and percussion has been a fruitful one for jazz and jazz-derived improvised music. The absence of the harmonic definition conventionally provided by piano or its equivalent allows for a great degree of musical freedom in many forms. Three new releases from the No Business label provide a window into the different flavors of freedom of the winds-bass-drums trio.
To start with the least conventional of the trios, there is The Spell by a trio led by French hornist Vincent Chancey and including the late double bassist Wilber Morris and the percussionist Warren Smith. All three musicians are or were highly accomplished practitioners of the art; Chancey, whose name may be less familiar to many, spent the mid 1970s in Sun Ra's Arkestra and the 1980s in Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and the David Murray Big Band. The Spell is an archival recording made in the Kraine Art Gallery in New York City in October of 1987; the sound quality is somewhat raw and the audio field shallow-as one might reasonably expect from the on-the-spot technology of the time-but the performances come through clearly and eloquently. Chancey takes an unlikely candidate for lead instrument in a jazz setting and plays it nimbly; Morris and Smith respond with both power and subtlety. The group's sui generis makeup lends the collective sound a warm, wine-dark quality which is only emphasized when the keys turn minor, as they do in the first piece, a composition by Morris. What keeps the music from being confined to a narrow range of timbres is Morris' moving back and forth between arco and pizzicato and Smith's use of mallet percussion. The subtle framing effect this has on Chancey's horn comes out particularly well on the fourth track, another Morris composition, where first double bass and then mallet percussion play in unison with the horn. The Spell is a rewarding album and another example of No Business' making available historic performances that otherwise would undeservedly be forgotten. [...]"-DBarbiero, Avant Music News