"According to Paul Cezanne, art - that is, a personal visual perspective of the world imagined through shape and color - was "a music I hear in my face." Was he simply offering a poetic metaphor to express a degree of emotional intensity beyond the purely visual? Or suggesting a symbiotic relationship between their constituent parts? The notion that music is created by sound forms in some ways similar to the components of visual representation requires an acceptance of abstract values - that is, a state of mind that finds clarity and substance, passion and solace, in the essence, and not strictly the literal qualities, of the experience. Abstraction has gotten a bum rap over time; even Webster's Dictionary defines it as, among other things, an "absence of mind" and says to be abstract is to be "difficult to understand" and "impersonal, detached." Yet the act of abstraction can be one of discovery, revealing details of identity and nuances of emotion otherwise obscured by familiarity and superficiality.

That's what I hear - details of identity and nuances of emotion - in the music of this trio, an art that explores and exposes multi-dimensional perspectives, intersecting ideas, and a heightened sense of awareness. There's an audible directness of expression, of combination and play, which sounds spontaneously shaped and not designed for effect, and yet employs characteristics that ironically call to my mind visual art - not Cezanne, specifically, but the stark, abstract, multilayered, three-dimensional, post-De Stijl/ Constructivist reliefs and constructions of Burgoyne Diller or Charles Biederman.

In part, this comes from the nature of the individual components. Each member of the trio contributes a distinct tonal quality and rhythmic emphasis that intersects the others at key points in musical space. The music has no foreground-and-background or melody-and-accompaniment. These are not typically arranged songs, but asymmetrical, asynchronous constructs that develop from simultaneous, complimentary but peripheral gestures of the mind and heart. The harmonic contrasts that result from Joe Maneri's breathy microtones; the fixed pitches, inclining towards atonality, of Tyson Rogers' piano; and Jacob Braverman's ambiguously scored percussion color their contrapuntal angles and parallel lines. Layers of energy emerge from sepaate levels of intensity. Tenacity of spirit is the glue that binds the various events together into a single, significant entity.

As with any object in space, illumination (an awareness of effort and effect) will conjure degrees of shadow, as the program's title indicates - symbolizing the delicate condition of existence in the tenuous, constantly shifting area between the light and ultimate darkness, life and death. (At one point, as "Lazarus Shouts," Joe Maneri is literally speaking through his horn, confirming the re-discovered life force.) Clarinet and piano contemplate the uncertainty of reality "At Waterfall's Edge," where whispers grow turbulent and harmonic footing may be treacherous. Even the "touch," the physical immediacy, applied to the pair of piano/drum interludes highlights the sharp edges and chiaroscuric dynamics nature casts among crags and crevices "In the Shadow / Of the Mountain."

In his analysis of Charles Biederman's constructions ("Landscapes By Whatever Name"), Jan van der Marck cites form, color, space, and light as their essential components, with the shifting play of light on the fixed forms abstracted from nature becoming a permanent agent of complexity and change. Metaphorically, perhaps, "Ocean's Highgate Padlocked" could be thought of as making use of a similar realignment of detailed perception, with the saxophone line abstracted from a familiar melodic flow - that is, distorted in tone, reduced from conventionally lyrical intervals to microtonal shadings and sheer emotional emphasis, and phrased intuitively - several levels beyond even the decorative complexities of a Sonny Rollins or Elliott Carter, say, set into relief against external forces in a changing environment: the contrasting sparks of percussion and piano notes and clusters as they pass through shared space. The shifts in density and color become the dramatic focus, affecting the urgency of the saxophone's cry. Seen from this perspective, the music proposes a fluid three-dimensionality - an illusion, but one in keeping with its improvisational points of origin.

All art is an illusion. It's possible that Cezanne's statement reflects a desire to escape his structurally-derived perspective of landscapes and still lifes into an even-more abstracted world of pure color and symbolic image, something freer in form and imaginative in nature, something closer to the conditions of music. Something closer, perhaps, to what this trio does, which is to escape the confines of traditional form by abstracting their instrumental voices to their purest state of expression, animating space from a three-dimensional perspective, and discovering a new manner of song to sing in the bargain."-Art Lange, Chicago, March 2009