Few musicians have had the depth of impact on their chosen genre of music, yet gained as little wide-ranging recognition, as Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist and founding member of the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago (AACM). This recording is yet another testimony to the substance of Anderson's art.
Now in his late 70s, Anderson has lost none of the fire and imagination of his earlier recordings, and is still as garrulous and expressive as ever, from the evidence supplied by these six tunes in which he is accompanied by younger players Harrison Bankhead, on bass, and Tim Daisy on drums. In over an hour of music we get extensive exposure to Anderson's vibrant tenor saxophone tone and his creative imagination in a state-of-the art address.
The opener, "Sunday Afternoon," with its 24 minutes of sonic exploration, reminds one of the best spontaneous pieces that make up the memorable moments of recorded jazz history. Daisy's easy sauntering drumming, with lots of fiber and vivid swing, and Bankhead's walking bass that locks in with the flow of both Anderson and Daisy, while not boxed into any changes, are perfect underpinning for Anderson's flight of fancy. "Wandering" starts off with a kalimba and sax duet which goes on for quite a while before the bass kicks in with the rhythmic figures that thicken the plot of the tale the tune tells.
The variety of time-feels and conceptual textures is impressive given the trio format, as the musicians circumvent the tried-and-true uses of their instruments and explore other possibilities of timbre and rhythmic and melodic inventiveness. A good example of this is "The elephant and the Bee," which starts off as a gauzy ballad, breaks into a free-form number and after a kind of transporter-beam de-configuration, re-materializes in another quadrant of Anderson's playing...proving without a doubt that he is one of the masters of the half of the last century who deserves a wider audience.
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