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.