Zen Widow is really two albums. Album #1 is eleven mini-improvs, ranging from sixteen seconds to a minute long. These are striking conjunctions of disparate materials, like a musical equivalent of the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpses.” “It Was Meant to Aspire and Languish,” for instance, is (1) Lee Konitz practicing scales over inside-the-piano raindrop plinks; (2) the same with “let’s get a move on” swing drums slipping in behind, the plinks getting more insistent; (3) a ball dropped on the piano strings, alto and drums coming unglued, an indeterminate clatter as the sax oscillates more freely; (4) the sax, now chastened, zeroing in on a tidy conclusion, the pianist touching down a few seconds later with a twiddly anticlimax. Grand total: 49 seconds.

Album #2 is six pieces between five and eight minutes long: one composition by each bandmember, and three free improvs. Like the soundbites on Album #1, these six tracks range over many textures and idioms. Goodheart’s “Folk Song” is twilight flute-song, soft gongs, quivering piano-strings, and – later on – insistent clashes and wails. Powell’s “Over Me – Over You” is one note – a B-flat – riding a falling/rising chord sequence, with Gebbia keening in the manner of Trevor Watts or Jimmy Lyons. “Zen Widow,” by Gebbia, is a haunted echochamber of a piece, with Powell on musical saw and Goodheart keeping the sustain pedal down throughout, which flows right into the improvisation “Mistaken Poetry”: Gebbia in laconic Konitz mode again, Goodheart’s piano trembling and elusive, full of snaky Paul Bley counterpoint.

Listening to Zen Widow is like flipping through a sheaf of pages ripped from a sketchbook: sometimes you get fully worked-out pictures, at other times drawings too fragmentary to do more than intrigue and bemuse. The disc offers a provocatively cracked beauty that’s not always satisfying but surely isn’t meant to be either.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2005