The shared passion for Cy Twombly's art by bassist Damon Smith (head of Balance Point Acoustics) and pianist Marilyn Crispell is the primary motivation for the studio recordings heard in their unedited entirety on this CD. The lineup is completed by clarinetist Jason Stein and drummer Adam Shead, both regular collaborators of Smith before this 3 +1 project. As in the bulk of this label's offerings, the blending of diverse creative backgrounds and characters results in music free of commercial compromise and unencumbered by stylistic affectation.
When improvisational talents from various generations are juxtaposed, there are several potential pitfalls to navigating the common ground that emerges. One such issue is the tendency to resort to the jazz cliché, which can negatively impact the hypothetically more "free" components of an instrumental interaction. Luckily, in the case of Spi-raling Horn, this problem is not evident. Rather, the interplay is mainly identified by complex parallelisms and spontaneous subdivisions into smaller groupings, contributing to an acceptable intelligibility of the whole, even for audiences without a specific training.
Following a number of listening sessions where the material was received by this writer as an intriguing set of concurrent signals and trajectories, it was beneficial to study the album from the perspective of a single instrumentalist each time. This approach allows one to perceive, for instance, how the frequently uninterrupted streams of Stein's bass clarinet represent a series of intricate seam lines within perpetually evolving contrapuntal shapes. The latter are expanded and contracted by the pianism of Crispell who, as is characteristic of her idiom, is capable of interspersing rhythmic flexibility and a pronounced dissonant temperament with an uncommon lyrical quality.
Smith's multifaceted strategy is finely rendered by the skillful use of bowed drones and harmonics in reflective circumstances ("So Close It Cuts My Ribs"), as well as his ability to make the double bass appear as a noisy extension of ancient futurist currents. Shead's drumming succeeds in two simultaneous ways: it anchors the quartet to the acoustic concreteness of the "here and now", in the meantime delivering its communal stance from the burden of temporal subdivision. Incidentally, it is notable that there are still those who employ the term "rhythm section" in certain circles. However, the roles of a collective such as this are to be regarded as equal, with players occupying different planes of expressive autonomy yet fully respecting the space of others. In pieces like "Saturant Moon Water" this sensitivity is conveyed through an exploration of the most subtle and quiet aspects of the harmonic and kinetic spectrum. This is symptomatic of music that seems to exist beyond the boundaries of the segment, whatever the decisions made by the musicians in terms of beginning and end.
In a nutshell, receptive listeners are going to improve their auditory health while learning something about the culture of coexistence.
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