Liner notes:
The text from the original LP which was released in 1986 reads as follows:
“‘Resoundings’ are freely improvised works drawing entirely upon the enlivening spirit and method of spontaneous collective composition. This process has all but been lost to western music - classical, folk and popular. Its revival is owed to those jazz and progressive rock forms which have thrown off the old skins of times past. Such musics are made by the irrepressibly vibrant, if alienated, cultures arising from the industrial world - both east and west and, in their many manifestations reflect the new experiences and aspirations of modern man.
The titles on this album illustrate ideas and themes which inform and resound in the musicians’ imaginations. They are drawn from poetry, history and political references with which the players sympathise. But the real poetry lies in the startlingly simple way of making music. A direct and creative dialogue in which intuition and sheer exuberance takes command of considerable technical facility and pushes the players into a joyful dialectic of sounds and ideas. What results is a jubilant contrast to the factory-like repetition of commodity musics and the tiring modes of ‘classicism’ which are still needed to bolster the out-moded and repressive social ideals of bourgeois life.
The music on this album, like the myriad of alternative forms which characterise the growing and international improvisation movement, leaves the musician unhindered in his creativity. And, being free in his music sees the possibility of freedoms elsewhere in life.â€
Upon making the decision to release this material as a CD I could see no reason to change the above written material. To my mind it still holds. And the additional title: ‘Firehouse Suite’ - from one of the band’s tour performances during March of 1986 - ably demonstrates that the sensitivity of performance was perhaps even greater in the ‘live’ situation that in the rather artificial setting of a recording studio. This observation tends to confirm my view that the dialogical processes are sharper when there is the added element of an audience for the musicians to consider. It is not of course that the musicians try to divine what the audience might want and then try and deliver. From from it; that road leads nowhere but to self-deception. But rather, being aware that the material is being perceived and considered by others in the moment of making music acts to sharpen the musicians’ performance sensitivity.
Eddie Prévost
February 2000
'Fantasia In G-Men' 'Stick Of Rain' 'Pie, Sky, Die' 'Lampshade Girls' 'Slaughterhouse 5')' Machines Of Loving Grace' 'Ash Garden' 'Captain Swing' 'Turn The World'
Resound is an impressive trio, its roots are in the music of Ornette Coleman but it has travelled some distance along its own path. The excellent 'G-Men' and 'Captain Swing' make this inspiration most clear, with the band moving propulsively, McPhail dancing to the Coleman piper and Prévost sound ling more like Ed Blackwell than I have ever heard before. On the other tracks the similarities are more oblique but there is not one weak track. The spirit of collective improvisation is sustained throughout and, as one might expect, Prévost's 'sticks' do make it swing at all tempos. McPhail's most fiery flute solo is on 'Ash Garden', his best soprano is in his lengthy examination of 'Loving Grace' and his most moving alto is found in his slightly Aylerish playing on 'Slaughterhouse'. Moore pulls his weight strongly, not only by supporting McPhail in the orthodox manner, but also by suggesting new routes and, as in the case of 'Slaughterhouse', by bringing the work to a novel climax. Because of its nature, the music is copyrighted in the names of all three players. This is appropriate for what is a trio album with a difference.
Barry McRae
Jazz Journal July 1986
A things that puzzles me — the need to inscribe ideology in the grooves of improvised music. It's inescapable, apparently. I find I'm doing it even as I try and prise away the meaning that the players have rushed to snap round the naked sound the moment it ends.
Resounding is almost a classical free improvised music — the close argument, the unity in variety of tones, the melody and rhythm shapes thrown: McPhail's first sobbing runs could aImost be Ornette, and the three of them can move like the Golden Circle Trio, bur there's a lonelier, older tone here too. McPhail's flute playing echoe's the shakuhachi's lorn hiccup, and that follows
through into his alto and sopranino in places. Moore's thick whirl can be exhausting, but in this context its weight makes for coherence. And Prévost has learnt to make drums sing; with the least flashy of styles, he can run down the fugitive bear with an admirably simple clarity.
Their idea — that a musician free in his music will see the possibilities of freedom in life elsewhere — is a beautiful and fabulous ideal, built (like all important ideas) round hope and wordplay — and the beauty and fabulation the three contrive in the music wouldn't disgrace and shouldn't undermine it. But of course it does. Not by violence or estrangement or contradiction (a single listen opens precisely the right mood of sympathy): there's an older and more powerful tussle being carried on here than the class war that these players hope to resolve: their words, the little battle-cry of their resolve, is picked up and turned into base coinage: adorning sleeves, the paragraphs harden into consumer codes, the analysis of a music's freedom has become a removable sticker beckoning or threatening a potential buyer's habit-bound pigeonholing. Ideas are also commodities.
But the music, once heard, instead of waking us up to some mythical and premusical understanding of liberation, keeps its grip, pulls human things back into the prehuman, to a time before languages or codes, to the construction of words and the world from the primeval (bl)ooze. Recommended.
Mark Sinker
The Wire August 1986