Alex von Schlippenbach is one of the truest of Thelonious Monk’s disciples. On Broomriding he locates the gentleness in Monk’s music missed by those pianists who caricature it by deliberately playing “wrong,” i.e. harshly. Even in anarchic surroundings, Schlippenbach plays delicately, unobtrusively, as if dabbing at the keys instead of striking them; refraining from playing chords too often, he runs notes through his hands like a string of beads. His longer runs suggest his affinity for the Monk of “Trinkle Tinkle” and “Four in One,” breakneck lines spun out to the edge of logic or comprehensibility – on “Broomriding 4” in particular Schlippenbach seems haunted by “Trinkle Tinkle”’s scrambling-over-itself theme.

The album’s backbone is the seven-part “Broomriding” series. Though they are basically free improvisations, they are orderly in their exposition of their core musical ideas; since they are credited to Schlippenbach rather than the entire quartet, perhaps there’s more “composition” to them than first meets the eye. Tristan Honsinger contributes two pieces – the jazz waltz “Poetica” and “Attya,” a quizzical, mothwing-fragile version of “All the Things You Are” – and the quartet also plays two pieces by Eric Dolphy. Their reading of “Straight Up and Down” underlines how much Dolphy’s late work owes to Monk’s example. “Something Sweet, Something Tender,” though, is impossible to speak of in terms of stylistic influences: it is sui generis. The quartet’s reading of it is placed as a coda to the disc; it follows the contours of original version closely, but ebbs away discreetly rather than mimicking Dolphy’s original, hair-raising ending.

Bass clarinettist Rudi Mahall’s good-humoured, graceful playing has so far been infrequently caught on disc – his most widely available records up to now have been his duets with Aki Takase, Duet for Eric Dolphy (Enja) and The Dessert (Leo). In his hands, the bass clarinet writes with a nib (other bass clarinettists make it sound like a thick black marker). He misses out, perhaps, on the alternately soaring and plummetting extremism of Dolphy – the darkness, as well as the guffawing humour. Which is simply to say that Mahall sounds like his own man. Paul Lovens is as always a pleasure to hear, his every gesture seeming to come out of nowhere. He delights in hitting a cymbal as messily as possible, or in dropping bombs everywhere but on-target. Called upon to play straight time on “Poetica,” he does so immaculately, his businesslike nonchalance the reverse of Bennink’s look-at-me swing drumming (as much Gene Krupa as Jo Jones); while in answer to Honsinger’s heavy cello riff on “Broomriding 6,” Lovens immediately summons up the right clanking, traintrack groove.

Honsinger is at his most purposefully contrarian on this disc. His devices are much the same as usual: the determinedly unsweetened arco work (he rarely plays pizzicato, presumably because it’s hard to make it sound sufficiently grating); the frenzied, inarticulate vocalizing; the occasional spoken-word foray into Waiting for Godot territory (only one instance here, sadly a bit flat: “We have to go back. [Pause.] Because we couldn’t... go... any... fur... ther.”); the love of the completely non-apropos; the sly pretence of being so wrapped up in his own playing that he’s forgotten what everyone else is doing. On other recordings Honsinger is either fearsome or comic; here the results are richer and more ambiguous, and perfectly in tune with the music’s slightly dreamlike character.

One recent reviewer of this disc complained that it was lacking in “fireworks.” Quite right: if that’s what you’re looking for, you should give Broomriding a wide berth, as it’s merely one of the most eloquent and perfectly judged albums of improvised music of 2003.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, April 2004