Pianist Steve Lockwood has frequently worked with Meredith Monk, who contributes an enthusiastic liner note to Rite of Passage. His musical companions here include a range of stalwarts of the West Coast jazz scene, mostly from the 9 Winds circle of musicians; Vinny Golia is characteristically forceful on the brisk, angular “Ed’s Thetic,” perhaps the best track. There’s much here to suggest that Lockwood’s got interesting things to say, but the disc itself is only episodically successful, an inconsistency highlighted by the album’s miscellaneous nature (it’s a compilation of three different studio sessions). The trio performances by Lockwood, Smith and Mintz are hampered by a certain mutual incompatibility: “Nightfall,” for instance, is an intriguing exercise in the suspension of tonal resolution, but it is slightly let down by Mintz’s awkward handling of the Latin rhythms in the central section. In general, all of these tracks have points of interest, and it would be an OK disc if it weren’t for the fact that the one conspicuous clunker – the horrid “This Is Now” – takes up almost a third of its length. This is a 15-minute visit to cheesy jazz-rock hell, with Lockwood’s synthesizer set throughout to a teeth-jangling quasi-harpsichord sound. Lockwood eventually takes some mercy on the listener by splicing in a not-bad piano trio improvisation near the end, but only the intrepid will venture that far. The track was certainly enough to make my hitherto wavering thumb point firmly downward. Sound quality is blunt and lopsided, being heavily weighted towards piano and saxophone, and the piano’s pretty ugly-sounding.

Sassafras Hello is a storming set of duets from pianist Robert W. Getz and saxophonist Elliott Levin . In his unusually thoughtful and helpful liner notes Getz comments about the opening “Prelude”: “My intro tries to mimic two different pianists playing at the same time (one a little more straightforward than the other)”. As that description suggests, there’s much about his playing here that will strike a chord with fans of attacking, independent-handed pianists like Borah Bergman and Joel Futterman. Elliott Levin is a dab hand at negotiating such turbulent musical waters, with a c.v. that includes stints with Cecil Taylor (including the recent Sound Vision Orchestra); rather than just a hard blower, he’s an impressively fertile thinker, and for all the toughness of his tenor playing and the acrid scrawl of his soprano, he’s basically a melodist who’s always in touch with the swaggering swing and the beseeching eloquence of a more orthodox jazz saxophone tradition. Getz is occasionally a little too bound up in predictable lurching rhythms and chordal thunder in the middle and lower registers – the clichés of the genre – but both players are top-notch listeners, and despite the dissonance of their musical idiom there’s a genuine sense of conversational ease and warmth here. This is a quality hour’s worth of playing with no safety nets but surprisingly few dead spots, even on the longer improvisations. The album’s centrepiece is “Twenty Year Circus,” a tribute to Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus. Over the length of the improvisation there’s a number of false resolutions, where one or both of the players obviously considered winding things up; but on each occasion they discover there’s much more to say: rather than flagging, the performance actually gets more interesting and involved the further it goes on. Sassafras Hello is thinking man’s energy music, and comes strongly recommended.

The crude packaging on Carl Smith’s disc isn’t much help but from what I can tell the disc under review is called A.A.C.M.C. and his band’s name is E.C.F.A.; there’s no indication of what any of these acronyms might stand for. This disc was apparently first released a year or so ago; this fresh edition was rushed out within weeks of Peter Kowald’s death, the cover newly adorned with the phrase “with peter kowald (r.i.p.).” An honest tribute, or repellent and tasteless hearse-chasing? I’ll leave it for you to decide. In any case, Kowald is in fact only on one track, a 12-minute improvisation that finds him sitting in with a bunch of free-jazz players from the Texas scene. I’m sure the experience was a thrill for the members of E.C.F.A. but there’s nothing on this track or on the other two that need give free-jazz enthusiasts pause. The music is ardent but entirely mediocre post-Ayler free jazz; its completely derivative nature is underlined by the absurd liner notes, which contain (by my count) thank-yous to over 70 different people or bands.

Midnight Choir documents what sounds like a capable and empathetic group that seems to take its stylistic lead from saxophonist Seth Paynter’s devotion to the work of John Coltrane. I’d be interested to hear what they can do in a more formal situation; this brief snapshot of their work at a Texas gig in 1998, with friends flitting on and off the bandstand, is merely so-so. The longest track, a reading of “Equinox,” is disappointingly messy and the one effort at playing “outside,” “The Mind,” is inconsequential. There are better things, though, on Paynter’s original “Ganges” (very much in the line of Trane’s Indian-influenced pieces), Albert Mangelsdorff’s ballad “Street of Loneliness,” and the slow groove of “Two Fascinations” (though guest-trombonist Bruce Melville doesn’t distinguish himself). Even so, there’s basically nothing to write home about on the disc, and the drab sound and persistently low-key tempos and dynamics make even the 30-odd minutes of this disc seem rather too much. As a rather pointless makeweight the disc contains the brief “A Dance for Keiko,” a shockingly noisy and lo-fi club recording of a differently constituted band a couple years later. The fidelity is so poor that the recording actually captures the audience chatter better than the music itself.

Recorded live at the Knitting Factory, Challenge of the Now catches this stripped-down trio by turns jamming over Grassi’s blunt backbeat and engaging in untethered free playing. The result is a mix of interesting episodes with mere noodling, and the disc’s impact is hampered by the abrasive, buzzy recording quality and poor production. “Charly Parker Place” opens with a sprinkling of dropouts, and the piece is interrupted midway by ten seconds of dead silence. There is however some worthwhile playing on the disc, especially by the great clarinetist Perry Robinson, with his incomparably acerbic, gutsy sound (on an instrument which so often sounds bland in other hands). The briefest track, the 10-minute piece “Who’s controlling whom?,” starts as laid-back soul-jazz, but at the centre of the piece is a neurotically jerky free-tempo section performed over Grassi’s chattering drums. Decidedly the oddest piece on the disc, it’s also perhaps the most effective. The Beat poet Hersch Silverman sits in at the end of track 3 for a reading of his poem “All is but a dream” to musical accompaniment: this is OK if you like that kind of thing, but I must confess that one listen to it was enough for me.

And now for a visit to the Twilight Zone, courtesy a Japanese pianist named Aratori. His disc Timing-Progression.com Aratori Vol.1 is, he tells us in the copious notes that accompany this release, the first fruit of thirty years’ musical research. During this span of time he discovered and refined a revolutionary musical system he calls the Timing Progression Theory, about which you can hear much, much more on his website (which handily doubles as the title of his CD). Given its lengthy gestation you might perhaps anticipate that timing-progression.com would be an expansive outpouring of the music that’s been pent up inside Aratori all these years, but you’d be wrong: it is a surprisingly compact aesthetic statement. Very compact, in fact – the entire disc is 6 minutes, 58 seconds long. The disc is divided into 18 tracks, of which the first track is a 64-bar electric keyboard improvisation (one minute, 29 seconds long) that bears a certain resemblance to the work of Lennie Tristano. Tracks 2-9 are exactly the same performance, now divided into eight-bar sections. Track 10, entitled “cut1,” is the same performance yet again, with (according to Aratori’s liner notes – I didn’t actually try to verify this) one beat removed to make it subtly different. Tracks 11-18 are “cut1” again, divided into eight-bar sections. So – in case you weren’t paying attention – the 6 minutes, 58 seconds of Timing-Progression.Com actually contain only a minute and a half’s worth of music, repeated four times. Nonetheless, says Aratori, the disc required 180 days for recording (though, curiously, elsewhere in the notes is the information that the album was cut on a single day).

In his notes the pianist next addresses a question about this CD that may arise in skeptical jazz fans’ minds: “Why does it cost as much as $40?” The answer appears to be complex, to judge by the two pages of explication that follow. From what I can make out, it involves his conviction that any purchaser of the CD will want to listen to it at least 100,000 times. Helpfully, he assures us that this is physically possible: “I have listened to it about 100,000 times in a year after my recording it. Really? Yes, it needs just 10 hours a day. And I continue to do.” Your forty bucks also gets you an authentic Aratori signature: according to the website, “The title and so on with his autograph are all written by Aratori's hand. Your name etc. ‘to Your name’ can be also written. . . . And a serial number is written begining from ‘No. 0001.’ That is to say, the serial number means how fast you discover the value of Aratori's music historically!” I am truly disappointed that my review copy is unnumbered. Drat!

Nate Dorward

Cadence, January 2003