The Diary of Dog Drexel
Four pieces of Scott Fields with addition of a fifth piece assembled by Gregory Taylor using soloist improvisations of the members of band, a zigzagging job this, lost between sour and sweet melodies; child of so many outlines, as well as enormous bursts of fire from the trumpet of Greg Kelley. The breaths of the Nperign school become diluted in a series of melodic contortions that are in fact fascinating, creating solutions certainly not new but surely captivating as few have been. Composition and improvisation keep pace with each other, making swells along the way on evolutions—sometimes very much Coleman-like—of Guillermo Gregorio on alto sax and on clarinet, and in a caustic vein that animates and guides the actions of the good Kelley on the trumpet. In truth there is very little in the way of real ostinati, nervetheless, the first track flows a little strangely, lunar, between pursuing winds and percussion that has a ceramic quality; the discourse changes remarkably in the case of Pissed with its structure perennially in the balance between hysteria and moments of apparent calm where the tension is really palpable before falling headfirst into an abyss of dissonance, sort of ecstatic in form; a kind of ritual emigration guided by the contortions of the winds. The following track, Bummed, churns up new phantoms of the house of Kelley, replacing the roughness that more usually characterizes them with a form much more harmonious and round where each instrumentalist seems concentrated in the desire to create a crafty meditative viewpoint. This is a work that lives on the impulses of the musicians but also on their ability to hold back those impulses in favour of writing that’s sometimes delicate and escaping to where wide spaces can contribute to the creatiion of an evocative and oniriche atmosphere without however ever diminishing a good dose of uncovered nervousness. Agitated reveals itself to be the central nucleus of the work with its structure run through, improbably, by the winds and the percussion and stretched strings, and again pauses and divisions in which discords are revealed to exist in order then to be abandoned, in a vision that, as much as it owes to the past seems also to be projected towards the future, but without the slightest pretention. The piece concludes with Medicated that contrasts with the rest but perhaps precisely in virtue of its difference it seems to be perfectly assigned to close this work in the appropriate manner. Cold without doubt, but necessary to restabilize, after the smoothness of the previous movements, the sacred germ of doubt. The final that loses itself in silence leaves us in possession of a work of remarkable beauty to add to the list of things received. 3½ stars — Kathodik