Review 2. Point of Departure

Eddie Prévost is best known for his 44-year membership in AMM, the British improvising ensemble that has pioneered substantial areas of layered, timbral and long-form free improvisation and in which Prévost has become the defining presence. Even within AMM he has covered an array of percussion approaches, but he has also had a significant if less conspicuous presence as a free-jazz drummer, working in bands that work with more traditional values of rhythm and dialogue. Also a frequent leader of improvisation workshops, Prévost is wearing many of his musical hats here, including record producer, on Sum’s debut. Guitarist Ross Lambert and saxophonist Seymour Wright are among the younger improvisers that Prévost has mentored and championed for more than a decade. Given the previous credits of Lambert and Wright, it will likely come as a surprise that Sum’s two-CD set, recorded on a February day in 2008 at London’s Cafe Oto, comes not from the more abstract and timeless side of Prévost’s improvising but from the very core of his free-jazz playing. It’s undoubtedly a “jazz” record and, given the better-documented predilections of the participants (Wright is capable of sitting with an alto saxophone in his lap, playing it by moving a microphone over the sound-holes, a position as radical as, and directly reminiscent of, Joseph Beuys cradling a rabbit’s corpse for the performance piece, “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare”), at times surprisingly gentle and tonal.

The group possesses tremendous fluidity, Prévost creating dense and mobile rhythmic fields against which Wright and Lambert move in and out of tonal episodes, ranging freely from honking (if somehow minimalist) intensity to truncated lyricism. Wright covers a surprising range of traditional alto sonorities, while Lambert develops his fundamental tone from the lightly amplified sound of ’50s jazz guitar. On the first disc, called “Invenio,” melodies first emerge as a surprise – “Stella by Starlight,” “Giant Steps” – but one gradually senses these are forms that are constantly available here, multiple patterns (topics) moving in and out of focus with the shifting dialogue. There is a long stretch at the beginning of the second disc, “Ergo,” that suggests what might happen if Lee Konitz’s Motion (his 1961 masterpiece with Elvin Jones and Sonny Dallas) were beamed out into space, picked up 25 light years away, its messages interpreted, commented upon and reconstituted, and the results returned at the same velocity with striking audio presence. This is jazz clarified to the purest event and exchange, possessed of an inevitability that includes both the pleasure of the momentary dialogue and a consciousness of the complex status of its rhetoric and its historical position.

Stuart Broomer
Point of Departure — an on line music journal. Issue 27. February 2010.