This duet album between saxophonist and clarinetist David Boykin and percussionist Bakari Davis is perhaps Boykin's most striking and personal statement to date. Boykin is a serious person and player; he takes his position in Chicago's AACM without a hint of levity. The five tracks here, totaling just over 40 minutes, reveal the breadth and depth of Boykin's mastery of the tenor saxophone. Here are bleating runs through scales and pitches, harmonic extrapolations, and contrapuntal improvising that is knotty with complexity, all-out blowing, and hyper-rhythmic breathing techniques. In a spirit that evokes John Coltrane's Interstellar Space (though Davis is certainly not Rashied Ali), the expression here is quite simply to remove the separation of the time-space continuum between past and future. Boykin calls out to the ancestors of the music and his heritage while reaching a whole step forward in an attempt to engage the emerging culture of the new jazz that comes out of his own generation of players -- particularly in his native Chicago. Interestingly, the most notable track here, Black Magic, is also its shortest. Evoking Roscoe Mitchell's The Maze and SII Examples, Boykin pushes the tension limits of his embouchure, the multiphonics invention of previous innovators (he can get three notes at a time from the tenor in different tonalities), and the real-time dynamics of his movement around the horn, while Davis holds a backdrop, a net with lots of holes to jump through and knot over. It's one of the most breathtaking uses of four minutes and 38 seconds in free jazz history. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi

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