Hornets Collage
Overall, Hornets Collage is lyrical, enduring, spacious yet subtly captivating as the Trio pursue layered themes and sweet-tempered choruses while the music breathes life and conjures up vivid imagery proportionate to an impressionist painter of landscapes or dreams…. Hornets Collage is an authentic synthesis of interminable patterns as the musicians keenly and vividly conceptualize the notions of nature, hard at work. Recommended! **** — All About Jazz
Song Songs Song
On Song Songs Song Parker and guitarist Scott Fields engage in a freeform, improvised route amid track titles that would make Captain Beefheart proud. The duo partakes in scratching and clawing via lightly amplified electric guitar lines and contrasting sound-shaping maneuvers. On the opening “LK 92,” perhaps the most accessible piece of the bunch, Parker and Fields render a laidback jazz-blues motif topped off with an affecting melody and random shifts in pitch. Although the guitarists occasionally crank it up and with just enough amplification to generate some bite, the majority of the set is structured upon irregular ebbs and flows.
The duo uses space as a means for maintaining an element of surprise while also employing volume control techniques and assimilating a wide-ranging latitude of viewpoints. The 17-minute improvisation “Untitled, 1955, Crayon On Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box,” is part minimalism and dissonance, embellished with clanging harmonics and odd phrasings. The picture painted here is that of two shrewd operators establishing a few guidelines, yet not knowing or caring where they’ll end up. 3 stars (out of 5) — DownBeat
Barclay
Guitarist Scott Fields’ distinctive approach to composition marches to the next level on this third installment of the “Beckett Trilogy,” where he uses additional Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) plays as an inspiration for these three extended works, based on the novelist’s text/plots.
The ensemble seemingly weaves some of Beckett’s black comedy and humor into concise and rather spirited statements via geometric, non-linear and asymmetrically paced grooves with incongruent slants, offering some brain candy for your psyche to nibble on. Fields’ complex works contain elements of pathos amid traces of melodic content and themes that are often renewed and deformed. And there’s lots of counterpoint between the guitarist and tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert in tandem with fractured pulses, false endings and rough-hewn free style excursions. The band undulates the current with variances in pitch and cadences that occasionally lead to some fun and frolic.
“…but the clouds ...” is one of three extended pieces designed with Avant chamber inferences, punk jazz, and quietude, segueing to a bit of fire and brimstone, spurred by cellist Scott Roller and drummer Dominik Mahnig’s rambunctious exchanges. Fields’ electric guitar distortion techniques spark a gritty, in-your-face muse, amped up by the drummer’s jackhammer-like accents and brusque fills. Nonetheless, the quartet maintains a continuum of suspense, although these pieces demand some degree of critical listening: it’s by no means background or mood music.
Throughout, the quartet seemingly integrates Beckett’s manifold plots that continually unfold, complete with scenic environs, narrow alleyways, big city debacles and penetrating narratives, accentuating Fields’ excitedly imaginative and largely incomparable methodologies. **** — All About Jazz