Bassist Paul Rogers is a major presence not only in British improvised music, principally through his longstanding collaboration with Keith Tippett, Paul Dunmall, and Tony Levin in Mujician, but also in his adopted country of France, where he collaborates regularly with Michel Doneda, Lê Quan Ninh, and Ramon Lopez. Listen brings together two of his all-too-rare solo sets, the first three tracks recorded in Le Mans in 1999 by Jean-Marc Foussat (and originally scheduled to be released on the French label Potlatch), the fourth a 19-minute extract of a concert dating from ten years earlier in a London pub called the Sir Walter Scott. A fabulously agile bassist (Dave Holland's solo work often comes to mind), Rogers is all over his five-string bass in Le Mans (he also makes occasional use of extra instruments), but the music he produces always manages to steer clear of the all-out physical endurance test aesthetic of a Peter Kowald or a William Parker. His bowed work is rich and resonant, and as open to folk-inflected melody as it is to extended techniques (imagine Joëlle Léandre without the extra vocals), and he manages to make the venerable instrument sound like anything from a violin to a sitar to a lap steel. "I never have much to say about what I do," writes the bassist self-effacingly in the notes; with music as strong and satisfying as this, he needn't say a word. ~ Dan Warburton, Rovi