Oboist Kyle Bruckmann’s Wrack is a showcase for his work as a composer and arranger, which mines a neo-Third Stream vein with results sometimes resembling early Dave Douglas. Bruckmann’s charts have a stately melancholy that suits the sombre front line of oboe, trombone and viola. But things are always just a step away from boiling over: Bruckmann drops in a few nifty surprises, like the pots-and-pans opening to “Gearshifts & Parentheticals” or the vehement odd-meter groove of “Elegy for a Boiled Frog” straight out of the Vandermark 5’s bag, and with a live-wire drummer like Tim Daisy in the band things are never going to get too cozy. Bruckmann’s main turn as an improvising soloist comes on the sad, sinuous dance of “Extenuating Circumstances”; more often he plays an ensemble role, leaving solo duties to trombonist Jeb Bishop (who’s in great form on “Sins of Omission”) and violist Jen Clare Paulson. The disc’s hero, though, is Daisy, who really lets fly on some of these tracks. The drummer sits out the closer, though, a very pretty, through-composed arrangement of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” that harks back to the days when Ornette was being championed by George Schuller and John Lewis.

On Grand Mal, a set of free improvisations recorded in January 2002, Bruckmann is in the company of three Bay Area players, guitarists John Shiurba and Ernesto Diaz-Infante and percussionist Karen Stackpole. The ten improvisations are pithy expositions of sonic texture and colour. This is the kind of improvisation that starts with its premisses already in place, rather than with a period of searching for them: on each track a musical situation is quickly and confidently outlined, explored, and rounded-off, sometimes in as little as two minutes. In addition to oboe Bruckmann plays English horn and suona on this date, though the feral sounds he gets out of them make the exact choice of instrument almost immaterial. On some tracks he squawks and clucks in the manner of Zorn’s classic duck-call period, but his speciality is the multiphonic exploration of a single held note: the results of this kind of sonic incision are not as visceral as they can be on soprano saxophone (see Stéphane Rives’ Fibres for a good, recent example), but Bruckmann nonetheless gets under the skin through sheer, demented persistence, notably on the magnificent “Catatonic Posturing II”. Strong stuff.

Nate Dorward

Squid’s Ear, 2004