‘As playful as it is intense — firmly rooted in tradition, yet endlessly searching and adventurous. Each of the thirteen short pieces explores one or more expressive possibilities of the piano and are, in the words of Adam Shatz in the liner notes, ‘marvels of compressed exploration. To listen to them in succession, as they’re meant to be heard, is to enter a vast, sophisticated, and deeply considered sound-world. Song Unconditional is also gorgeous, sometimes startlingly. It belongs, I think, in the company of the most impressive solo piano albums of recent years.’‘

‘One of the fiercest sounds in modern jazz… The New York-based sax player and co mix it up, from funk shuffle to full-on swing, on their blistering fourth album, comprising eight tracks of angular yet explosive experimentation…
‘The opening title track sets the tone, interweaving Lewis’s expressive lines among pianist Aruán Ortiz’s polyrhythms before reaching a blistering sax solo. As the album progresses, there is variety amid the consistency of Lewis’s blasting tone: a funk shuffle on Swerve, Latin rhythm on Per 6, and fast-paced swing on Black Apollo…’ (The blistering Guardian).

Brainy but intensely pleasurable piano-saxophone/clarinet duets; judiciously allusive, searching and rigorous.
Ortiz is a protégé of Muhal Richard Adams whose playing riddles Noncarrow with rumba, Messiaen with Monk, Yancey with yambu. Don Byron is a favourite of ours way back to Tuskegee Experiments and his revival of Mickey Katz.
The opening tribute to Catalonian jazz pianist Tete Montoliu — who smuggled flamenco into post-bop — is twinned with something from Musica Callada, by Federico Mompou, a kind of Catalonian Satie. (“The complexity of simplicity,” Ortiz calls it. “Mompou’s music doesn’t land the way we expect it to, and the resolution is like a door to what’s happening next. Mompou’s pieces have a lot of these doors, and they give a lot of space to creativity.”) There are interpretations of Black And Tan Fantasy (by way of Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington), Benny Golson’s Along Came Betty and Geri Allen’s Dolphy’s Dance; and a luminous arrangement of a Bach violin partita for solo clarinet. Byron chips in compositions dedicated to Lorraine Hansberry and Andy Capp; Ortiz some twelve-tone serialism and a tune based on ‘the triangular relationship within a series of three notes’.
Invigorating music; brilliantly recorded.

One seventy-minute outernational septet excursion, with notated intervals: guitar and home-made instruments with tablas and guzheng, drum-kit, electronics, trumpet.