Previous discs by the Rissi/Mazzola/Geisser trio have been called Fuego and Tierra, so it appears that Agua is the third volume of a planned tetralogy. Agua is recorded, like the former disc, in Milan, but I gather the musicians themselves are based in Switzerland. I could do without the coercive rhetoric of the musicians’ comments in the liner notes (Mazzola claims that those who dislike the music are “afraid of themselves”); fortunately, the music speaks just fine for itself.

The guiding spirit behind the music is Cecil Taylor, especially in the first two trio tracks – fervent, fire-and-brimstone tussles that rarely give the listener pause for breath. The 23 tumultuous minutes of “Agua” lie like a fearsome vortex at the album’s centre. The piece starts in a mode closer to late Coltrane than Taylor, with Mazzola showing an obvious concern for tonal centres (the opening sequence rides over his thuddingly repeated low C). But soon the improvisation slips its moorings and becomes a three-way tussle between Rissi’s guttural outcries, Mazzola’s frantic repetitions and tremolos, and Geisser’s almost elemental drumming. Formally, the performance is split in half by a long and insistent solo by Geisser, and the main difference between halves is that Mazzola shifts his attention in the second part to the upper parts of the keyboard. But basically this is music entirely addressed to the moment of creation, with little concern for obvious development or the construction of larger shapes. Nice to hear music of such fervour, but it’s just as well that the other two trio tracks, “Quemaris” and “Kaligandaki,” are more measured performances. Rissi sits out the first half of “Quemaris,” and here one can hear how closely and intimately Mazzola and Geisser interact, with the pianist eliciting some effective subterranean scrapings and rumblings from inside his instrument. The album is also leavened by an extended alto-drums workout, and two brief piano solos. The latter again suggest that Mazzola’s language, while in essence derived from Taylor, is often more tonally centred. Tough, uncompromising music: fans of the real hard stuff will want to check this disc out.

By comparison with Agua, Hour Glass seems almost mild-mannered, though by any other standards it’s a pretty strong brew. This is musicmaking on the heroic scale, the hour-long duration of each piece the aural equivalent of some giant Abstract Expressionist canvas. Although such marathon high-octane performances now have a long tradition behind them (and the example of Coltrane’s late music weighs heavily on the music), they still present unusual challenges for both musicians and listeners, especially when (as here) the musicians go without the safety net of precomposed material. Perhaps a little unusually, both sessions on the set were recorded in the studio; one more often encounters such large-scale improvisation in the concert situation, where the spur of an audience helps keep inspiration and energy levels from flagging.

The discs are differentiated both by featuring different bassists and by Dunmall’s choice of instrument. Disc 1, “Hour Glass,” finds Dunmall on tenor and Mattos on bass. The first ten minutes or so are comparatively temperate, but after that it’s more or less full-throttle all the way, with only a few widely-spaced pauses that serve to bring the energy level down to a point from which it may be rebuilt. Mattos is a gargantuan presence, hacking and slashing away and very much at the centre of the music. With tenor and bass in such close quarters there’s a strong sense of interaction, the players dodging around or banging up against each other. Bianco’s drumming isn’t terribly varied in approach or colour – basically, a continuous barrage that’s turned up or down a notch as occasion demands – and his two solo features aren’t especially different from each other or for that matter from what he does under the other players. The disc reaches a frenzied peak with the return of the saxophonist and bassist after Bianco’s first solo (CD index point 2); for this listener, diminishing returns set in after a while, but the performance holds together nonetheless without too many dry spells. Dunmall signals the approach of the end of the hour by scaling down his torrents-of-notes approach, rounding off the performance by working over a recognizable motif in more measured fashion.

Time for a deep breath. OK: on to disc two. “The Tepees Dive Deeply” was recorded a couple months later, with Dunmall on this occasion playing soprano and Paul Rogers taking over the bass chair. (Tepees . . . ? Oh right, got it, “Tony” and “Paul” = “T.P.s” . . . ) Whereas “Hour Glass” took several minutes to fully heat up, “The Tepees Dive Deeply” virtually dispenses with preliminaries, with only a few seconds of musical handshakes before Dunmall is tossing off fluent streams of notes over pell-mell drums and the bass’s rapidfire scribblings. Right off the bat there’s 20 minutes or so of almost flat-out blowing, with only a halftime rest for a bass solo. Dunmall’s a blunter player than, say, Coltrane or Evan Parker, and he tends to hit notes right on the head, producing rapid but entirely even and unbroken melodic streams. Despite the fiery nature of the music, he is generally quite lyrical and coherent, not at all prone to squalling or screaming: depending on your taste this is either all to the good, or perhaps (given the idiom he’s working in) something of an expressive limitation. I’m rather happier when Dunmall at last staunches his flow a bit in the piece’s more moderately paced central section, a 17-minute interlude which finds the trio engaging in more explicit dialogue and patiently exploring instrumental colour. Here Dunmall comes up with an extraordinary array of gobbles, clucks, broken trills, mewls, ghostly split tones and even a darn good imitation of a bagpipe chanter; Rogers bows away with vigor, producing hysterical flutters, ponderous drones and metallic slashes. After this interlude winds up it’s back to the attack for the last 20 minutes of the piece, though there is now a more pointed sense of interplay between Rogers and Dunmall. The saxophonist winds the whole thing up with the same gesture as on “Hour Glass,” slowing down to work motivic variations in a fashion very much indebted to Coltrane.

On this date Bianco is rather more in the backseat – no drum solos on this one, I note. Rogers, too, isn’t as central to the music as Mattos was to “Hour Glass.” This is in part because of the different sounds of the players: Mattos, using a conventional bass, is louder and more resonant than Rogers, who’s playing a custom-made “A.L.L. bass,” which has six strings plus extra sympathetic strings (which give it an unusually metallic sound). But also there’s the matter of Dunmall’s use of soprano on the later session, so that the pitch gap between saxophone and bass reinforces Rogers’ inclination to go his own way.

So, two hours of blowing, with only a break for a CD change: what’s the final verdict? There’s no getting around the fact that this is a tough listen, and on the whole I’d prefer music that permits both musicians and listeners the chance for a fresh start. But devotees of hard, muscular blowing will find much to savour across the span of these two discs.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, February 2003