Description
Approached with open ears and heart, it’s an album that may well upend prejudices about free jazz. That’s mostly attributable to the emotive clarity of Tchicai’s performance, which floats with an enviable, gravity-defying, figurative freeness that comes with a virtuoso’s ability to project and transcend themselves instrumentally. But he’s not playing solo, and the supporting cast all play crucial roles in establishing the conditions for noumenal flight, from the way Coxon’s swooping string and percussion samples buoy and egg Tchicai to unfurl his wings in ‘Lied’, to the haunting, red velvet Lynchian backdrops painted in piano behind ‘Test Piece 1’, and the beautiful play of fading light conjured by sallow strings and bowed cymbal on ‘Formalism’, while the remarkable closing couplet of ‘Lullaby’ and ‘These Pink Roses’, with its poem narrated by Steve Dalachinsky, surely seal the album’s absorbingly lyrical or cinematic nature.