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Trio
AAB believe improvisation can be a less insecure art form
than this; contemporary, human and personal- more akin to
the way children play, the way people talk, tell their stories
and interpret their reality (both around them and inside them)
at any given moment in time. Trio AAB's bass-free format creates
a sense of space and light in which the three musicians stretch
out to such an extent that the lack of bass is invisible and
forgotten. Like the Bill Evans Trio with Scott La Faro, their
commitment to collective improvisation shifts the focus of
the listener away from the soloist, to the awareness of the
group moving and creating music together.
These
three musicians are powerful and developed solo voices. This
album is bubbling over with totally 'on the money' improvisation,
saturated with swing and groove and bejeweled with the sound
of musicians having fun throwing ideas about without fear:
just letting the ideas flow. Their deep awareness of, and
involvement with, structure and form is clear in the music
but also reflected in the group's name. In musical notation,
AAB represents two things the same followed by something different-
mirroring the group's line up of two identical twins, Phil
and Tom Bancroft, and a Kevin MacKenzie. More importantly,
their involvement with structure is proved in the uncanny
way in which the trio work together to produce music with
real drama, pace, tension, sudden twists and turns, and releases-
just as if it were composed in advance.
Of the
compositions on this album only two ('It Could Have Been'
and 'Flowers for Jim') have a conventional fixed harmonic
sequence or circuit, round which the musicians do their improvising
laps. The rest of the songs are more linear experiences, where
the band usually play a composition and then head off on a
story-telling journey with nothing planned in advance, carried
along by a deep sense of groove. The second track, 'Jam',
is the first thing that happened in the studio, when the musicians
simply picked up their instruments and played.
Like
Cold Fusion, a host of influences are discernible here; Ornette
Coleman, echoes of the guitar sound of Jeff Buckley, a continuing
taste of drum 'n' bass and dance music, a sprinkle of punk
and rock, shades of be-bop and jazz, the interplay of Scofield
and De Johnette for example, or Lovano and Motian. Many other
styles are echoed in the obsession with repetition and rhythmic
interplay that abound. It remains, as with their first album,
a fearless forward-looking statement on the reality of what
this music can be at this point in its development.
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