This one keeps you guessing: what on earth will the next track be like? It gets off to an uneven start: “Samba De Aztac” (a tribute to a Salvadoran artists’ collective) is a tad bombastic, and I’m not so sure about “Reincarnation 1968,” either, an homage to 1960s counterculture featuring a vocal chorus of “Hare Ram” and nods to Pharoah Sanders and Country Joe and the Fish. But then the album settles down with a jaunty reading of Mingus’s “Remember Rockefeller at Attica ,” and following a pair of nice originals there’s a memorable take on Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning,” with pianist Eli Yamin injecting stealthy commentaries into drummers Andy Demos and Marty Beller’s doublebarrelled groove. Weill’s “September Song” becomes an unusually effective 9/11 memorial, the melody slowly buried under tremulous layers of dissonance, in the manner of a Crispell ballad performance. There’s nothing earthshaking here, perhaps, but it’s hard not to like an album which can jump from “Come On (Let the Good Times Roll)” to Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space,” and whose program includes a blues in honour of the late great Walter Perkins.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, October 2005