Altoist Marco Eneidi's jazz heart seems to love both the colorful flight of the bop tradition and the extremes of the exploratory, tonally investigative avant-garde, and he likes them together like peanut butter and jelly. His band includes bassoonist Karen Borca, bassist Wilber Morris, bassist and cellist William Parker, and drummer Jackson Krall. Eneidi, who has spent time in bands with Don Cherry, Jemeel Moondoc, Jim Pepper, Sahib Sarbib, and others, is hooked deep into the notion that music created with a striated harmonic architecture must find a way to "swing." And while this band is primarily made up of vanguard journeymen (and woman), they can play anything. The strange notational marks that frame Eneidi's compositions are full of pitches and time signatures but nothing more. The bandmembers are supposed to come up with the rest. And they deliver here in spades. The title track is a lovely improvisational extension of a hard bop blues, with Eneidi taking a knotty break through the center of intervals instead of choruses. Untitled is based on a Cecil Taylor motif (and credited to him) that seems to whisper its way into being, slowly articulating the subtle nature of Taylor's own investigation into Duke Ellington's compositions. The Last Call, which closes the album, is a gritty exploration of tonalities via the blues as appropriated by bebop. With Parker bowing a modal undertone, Morris punches the line changes with fierce abandon and both Borca and Eneidi turn the blues figures over and under, sometimes playing them straight out of the book and at other times turning cadences into harmonic adventures where timbral shifts and distances between the two instruments (jazz bassoon is an amazing thing, man) become smaller in tone and nuance, until there is a single weave of inspired playing. This set is solid and should be looked into closely. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi

1		Final Disconnect Notice
2		[Untitled]
3		B Up to a Down to CT
4		Close - 4 - Close
5		La Chica con los Toros
6		The Last Call

	Like us on Facebook
	@SoundHound	Follow