Harris Eisenstadt is a young LA-based percussionist whose teachers have included Leo Smith and Barry Altschul; Fight or Flight, his second CD, owes something to the delicate soundworlds of both musicians. The instrumentation is pitched quite high, the main featured voices being the paired flutes of Burr and Philipson and Dutz’s marimba. Such an instrumentation lends the music an unusual lightness – one might say thinness – of timbre; and what actually stands out most prominently in the ensemble textures is the extensive use of the crotales, tuned metal discs that deliver a high, pure and very loud ting! with a long sustain (one percussion website I checked out boasts that they “can easily cut through the heaviest orchestrations”). The three tracks on this disc are much of a piece and, though the packaging doesn’t indicate whether Eisenstadt considers them a suite, that is surely what they are. “Rise” begins in an atmosphere of whirling improvisational chaos that’s actually rather untypical of the disc as a whole; but this is merely by way of preface to the main business, which is a restricted, slowly cycling set of chords that is virtually shorn of forward momentum but drifts along enigmatically nonetheless. “People Are Gonna Do What They’re Gonna Do” is organized around a set of brief, mournful themes garnished with crotale tings, which serve as a discreet framework for improvs by small subsets of players. I particularly liked Burr’s vocalized flute-playing in a trio with Casale and Eisenstadt. “Trouble Here, Fly There” is (at almost 18 minutes in length) the album’s most ambitious and diverse track. Again it allots a lot of open space to the players of the band for spotlit improvisations, but the whole structure crystallizes in the middle with a stealthy, lightly pulsed groove in 11. The pace and mood of the whole album is consistently sustained: cool, enigmatic, unhurried and decidedly allergic to obvious structural climaxes. The flavour is captured nicely (if somewhat preciously) by the CD’s epigraph, from Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes: “Time cannot be spurred on like a horse. But it is not so slow as a pushcart.” Perhaps Eisenstadt learned a bit, too, from Takemitsu’s lovely soundtrack to the filmed version of the novel?

My thoughts are mixed on the success of the CD as a whole. It’s not an instrumentation that greatly appeals to me (40-odd minutes of plinking marimba, ringing crotales and tweeting flutes? sorry . . . ) so I find I have to overcome my own inertia to approach the album with a sympathetic ear. Yet there’s no doubting the intelligence at work here, and with multiple listens I’ve found myself responding to the disc more generously. Not for all tastes, even among fans of chamberish improvisation, but definitely worth a listen.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, June 2003