The British saxophonist Tony Bevan recorded a pair of interesting discs for Incus in the early 1990s, including Bigshots, one of the most distinctive tenor/bass/drums discs of the decade. But after a further disc for Scatter, there was a long silence, at least on disc. Bevan has now returned to the studios under the auspices of his own label, Foghorn. The labelname is presumably a wry comment on his shift of focus as a player, from the tenor to the gargantuan bass sax. Nothing Is Permanent But Woe (the mock-lugubrious title is from the comicbook Fungus the Bogeyman) amounts to a manifesto for his instrument: 70 minutes of improvised music that pit Bevan’s bass sax against the piranha-hungry rhythm section of John Edwards and Mark Sanders. The essential dynamic of the album is between the slippery, mobile textures of Edwards and Sanders and Bevan’s insistently unadorned, snaggletoothed playing. He gets a fat, bulbous sound out of his instrument and likes to set it to work unpicking and reassembling the simplest of motifs. But he also touches throughout on a variety of other sonic textures: heavy breathing, ecstatic screeching, Surmanesque lyricism, Butcheresque multiphonics.

Tucked away among the energetic tussles on Nothing Is Permanent But Woe are a few unexpected essays in near-static minimalism. The latter becomes the primary territory of NHAM, a disc on which Bevan and Edwards are joined by two Chicago players, trombonist Jeb Bishop and drummer Michael Zerang. Perhaps to balance out Bishop in the front line, Bevan plays mostly tenor here. “Relics” is positively desolate: Bevan and Edwards patiently develop an unsettling subterranean soundscape, over which (as if off in the distance) one can hear Bishop’s mournful trombone calls; Zerang contributes slow-motion cymbal crashes and what might almost be the peals of windchimes. The performance builds to an uneasy, juddering crescendo, but the extended coda (often little more than faint and widely spaced tinklings of bells) is so sparse as to approach AMM territory. The long title-track opens with some busy, forthright improvising and it’s the one track to contain (at its centre) an extended passage of freeform blowing; nonetheless, as with the other tracks on the album, these passages are contained within a whole that is curiously elusive and ambiguous.

Both of these albums work to one side of generic and stylistic distinctions (notably that between “free jazz” and “free improv”). Inevitably, given the instrumentation, they both have a dark and mysterious soundworld, one that perhaps takes a while to open up to the listener’s ear. But open up they do, and both are strongly recommended to fans of intelligent, freethinking musicmaking.

Nate Dorward

Coda, Jan/Feb 2003