Eddie Prévost’s Matchless label has been extraordinarily productive lately: in addition to these three discs, all recorded at Gateway Studios in 2003, he’s also released a duo album with John Tilbury (Discrete Moments, Matchless MRCD58), and also just published a book, Minute Particulars, through the label’s subsidiary imprint Copula. This cluster of releases gives a useful picture of what Prévost’s been up to lately, and comes as a timely reminder of his activities outside his longstanding group AMM, given the recent splintering of that group with the departure of Keith Rowe.

The Blackbird’s Whistle is by Prévost’s “other” ensemble, a trio with Tom Chant and John Edwards. I’m not familiar with their past work, though they’ve been together since the mid-1990s and have two previous Matchless discs under their belt. Of the three players, Chant is the least familiar outside the context of this group. On tenor he’s hot and guttural and a little wild, at times rather like Ayler or Sam Rivers, but with a habitual terseness all his own: often he grabs a phrase back as soon as he’s let it go, and at the end of a line he makes a clean break rather than trailing off Evan Parker-style. His bass clarinet work is tart, even prickly, and unusually free from Dolphyisms.

The five tracks on The Blackbird’s Whistle are all quite long, and have their share of dead spots, which usually come in the middle. The inflammatory opening of “Twirls of Modulation,” for instance, yields to a long and rather dull drum solo; once the full band returns things take off again, with Chant at last permitting himself to spin out long coiling lines and Edwards and Prévost toying with a conventional swing feel. “Gripped by Anguish” and the furious “The Blackbird’s Whistle” are the album’s strongest performances, and follow a similar path to “Twirls”: opening turmoil passes through a slightly unfocussed middle section, emerging at the end transformed. There are two bass-clarinet features, of which “A Conversation Without Head or Tail?” is disappointingly directionless while the shorter “A Bridge Thrown Over an Abyss” comes out better. Despite some unevenness, The Blackbird’s Whistle is well worth hearing.

A Bright Nowhere is something of a companion-piece to the earlier Matchless release None (-t) (MRCD54), which was a showcase for eight young players from Prévost’s improv workshop. The new disc’s title, and the titles of the improvisations, gesture toward the idea of utopia which was a touchstone of the Frankfurt School, and sure enough, the liner notes are prefaced with one of Adorno’s lapidary pronouncements: “If the utopia of art were actualised, art would come to an end.” The disc is almost exactly the length of The Blackbird’s Whistle, and much the same applies: long tracks, stylistically about halfway between free jazz and free improv, prone to dead spots (here, mostly coming as needlessly prolonged conclusions) but worth persisting with. Jamie Coleman contributes frail neo-Miles trumpet, and, less frequently, episodes of buzzes, gasps and strange, near-static drones. On the quieter tracks Nathaniel Catchpole has Evan Parker’s dour, murmuring tone and a similar habit of letting a line drift lazily over (or into) silence, but on harder-hitting improvs like “Cuckoo Cloud” he plays with a harshness recalling Pharoah Sanders. Alex James’s trickling, ambiguous Tilburyish piano sits oddly, though not disagreeably, with the music’s jazzier elements. Some of these tracks verge on energy-music – “Digging” and “Cuckoo Cloud,” where Prévost and Edwards really boot things along – but my favourite moments on the recording are slow-moving, almost translucent tracks like “Unutterable” and “A Bright Nowhere.”

Back in 1997 Prévost and Evan Parker recorded an excellent two-CD set of duets, Most Materiall, which drew from two different sessions: a very atmospheric set with Parker mostly on soprano and Prévost using bowed cymbals, gong and his own creation, the “string drum”; and a later, shorter session of straight-up tenor-and-drums. I’ve always liked the more colourful stuff better than the tenor/drums cuts, so it’s slightly disappointing that the sequel, Imponderable Evidence, sticks to the latter format. There’s not a great difference between the new disc and the earlier tenor/drums session, though the studio sound is a little less focussed on the new disc, and in general the music’s a little more low-key. Prévost only breaks out the sticks on one track, otherwise keeping to brushes or mallets; he mostly avoids cat-and-mouse interplay, instead elaborating continuous rolling, pattering figures that don’t directly intersect with Parker. The saxophonist is in an unusually discursive mood and sounds less dark, grainy and intense than usual, though perhaps that’s just the recording. Listening to his contributions I’m reminded of the experience of following the rapid, elided cadences of a fluent speaker of a language one doesn’t know: that’s an experience that can be fascinating or lulling depending on one’s mood, and much the same goes for Parker’s playing on this occasion. Only very rarely – such as the brief passage ten minutes in on “Exhibit A” – does he push towards one of his patented knotty climaxes.

The passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that provides the album’s title and subtitle (“the subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone”) suggests that our knowledge of other people is peculiarly dependent on “imponderable evidence”: “I may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one. . . . But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference.” Wittgenstein suggests that art is one of the few ways of giving expression to these otherwise inexpressible ways of knowing and judging others: “If I were a very talented painter I might conceivably represent the genuine and the simulated glance in pictures.” Likewise, it’s not easy to make fine distinctions between Most Materiall and Imponderable Evidence, but a track-by-track comparison suggests that the older album is still the champ. (Compare, for instance, Prévost’s restless, multidirectional work on the earlier “Not So Much for the Sake of Arguing as for the Sake of Living” with the monotonous blowout on “Exhibit E.”) There’s nothing especially wrong with Imponderable Evidence, but it’s still a pretty pointless exercise given how little it builds on its predecessor.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, November 2004