Trio Ahxoloxha is a longstanding group, although the palindromic bandname is new. Back in 1992, they released Youniverse, credited simply to Rob Brown, Whit Dickey and Joe Morris. This time round Dickey’s in the leadership role, contributing all of the compositions. Actually, it’s hard to spot much precomposed material here except on the closer, “Telling Moment”; but there is throughout Prophet Moon a strong sense of the drummer’s instinct for a highly orderly complexity. His rhythms characteristically stay in touch with a cooler groove – a lazy Elvin Jones triplety thing, a laidback shuffle, a Latin-jazz pattern – even as Dickey gives it a lopsided spin. Such a wheels-within-wheels approach meshes well with Morris, who favours looping, self-generating patterns that bob like corks. As so often with Morris, one gets the impression on this disc that he’s burrowing inside the music; a sense of an inner calm persists even as the complexities and volume build, and there are as many passages of cooled-out chordal dissonance as of Morris’s trademark agitated picking. Such restraint makes his blistering solo on “Riptide” all the more striking: it’s so densely packed that it sounds disconcertingly like a cut-up, as if someone’s loaded a dozen bop guitar albums into a computer, crunched them all down to a single solo, and played it back too fast. But elsewhere, Morris recedes to the edges of the music, his quiet revolving figures sometimes suggesting the rhythms of the world musics that obsess him, sometimes something mechanical. (In fact, near the end of “Prophet Moon” his loops sound uncannily like a record needle locked in a groove.)

In some ways Rob Brown is at once the key player on the album and the odd man out: a pungent melodist who picks his way across these treacherous rhythmic waters with the purposefulness of a man jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone. When he wants to he can generate a head of steam by feeding cyclically off his own fragmented melodies; but most often he develops his lines via wide, methodical sweeps pitched at a steep angle. There’s a lot of terrific Brown on this disc – sample, for instance, the superb duet between him and Dickey on the opening of “Riptide” – but his shining moment is undoubtedly the coda of “Prophet Moon” itself. The piece’s enigmatic title could well be a reference to Brown’s stirring muezzin calls here, which lend it a distinctly Middle-Eastern flavour. Generally he’s a very poised and uncluttered player, but this is the one spot in the album where he gets really heated, with some incomparably harsh and passionate overblowing. Great stuff, and the climax of a cracking album.

A casual look at the personnel on Eloping with the Sun can be misleading, as one might expect a familiar free-jazz guitar trio disc. But check out the instrumentation: Morris is on banjo and banjo-uke, Hamid Drake is on frame drum, and William Parker is playing zintir. (I’ve usually seen this spelled “sentir”: it’s a long-necked bass lute used in the Gnawa music of Morocco.) The session is an informal studio jam, with the loose ends tidied up by means of fades at the starts and ends of some tracks. The recording also captures the odd bit of studio chatter; in fact, “Dawn Son” is two minutes of desultory noodling with a conversation with the sound engineer audible in the background. (What this inconsequential track is doing on the disc escapes me.) The remaining four tracks are quite long, and much of a muchness: Parker and Drake cycle through a groove, while Morris goes at the strings with a frenzy of picking that might prompt even a pipa player or (come to think of it) Mahavishnu-era John McLaughlin to shake his head. I like the disc’s texture – all twang, buzz and thump – but in the end the disparity between the extremely repetitive grooves and Morris’s staunchless hyperactivity is merely frustrating, and the music too often sounds directionless. The principal culprits are the two central tracks, “Hop-Kin” and “Stepdance,” which account for 30 minutes of the album’s running time and appear to derive from the same performance. (The first is faded out; the second opens on an abrupt edit, with Parker picking over the same motif that he was playing before. Perhaps the edit was prompted by some recording or performance flaw?) One or the other track would have been entirely sufficient, since both of them explore the same territory at length. The best track on the disc is surely the final one, “Dream,” which at last finds Morris and the two others working in tandem on the same groove: Morris builds up a simple twiddling figure over ten minutes with a formidable focus and discipline, wiggling it in ever-more complex crossrhythms to what Drake and Parker are doing. It’s a pretty striking performance, and it’s a pity the rest of the album wasn’t on this level. Eloping with the Sun will nonetheless provide Morris enthusiasts a useful place to study his assimilation of world musics into his playing. But of these two discs there’s no question that Prophet Moon’s the one to plump for.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, May 2003