DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION - Two Infinitudes
Leo Records CD LR 839
Eli Wallace, piano; Rob Pumpelly, drums
Recorded Autumn 2015 in Berkeley, California
This music is animated, bouncing and dynamic; the musicians looking for audacious styles and fresh, innovative musical conclusions. They are seeking a new musical language, a new mode of expression. Much of what happens in these bare 42 minutes is their reward for their musical, ‘compositional’ experimentation. They have brought together the conformist rules and mores of conventional forms and practice and those newer, innovative and adventurous ways of expression and indeed of approaches to playing.
The result is that both Wallace and Pumpelly are creating expressive and passionate music which absorbs and epitomises the avant-garde in jazz, modern orthodox and free improv. It is all and each of them simultaneously. This makes for a music that cannot be stylised as any one of those genres, so in a sense it defies categorisation.
The overall sound or ambience of the album is wide-ranging, full of formal or technical amalgamations, as well as the entirely spontaneous, and all together these combinations are the recording’s global sound. The overruling effect is a dizzying spell of frenetic performance which may leave you breathless.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Leo Records CD LR 839
Eli Wallace, piano; Rob Pumpelly, drums
Recorded Autumn 2015 in Berkeley, California
This music is animated, bouncing and dynamic; the musicians looking for audacious styles and fresh, innovative musical conclusions. They are seeking a new musical language, a new mode of expression. Much of what happens in these bare 42 minutes is their reward for their musical, ‘compositional’ experimentation. They have brought together the conformist rules and mores of conventional forms and practice and those newer, innovative and adventurous ways of expression and indeed of approaches to playing.
The result is that both Wallace and Pumpelly are creating expressive and passionate music which absorbs and epitomises the avant-garde in jazz, modern orthodox and free improv. It is all and each of them simultaneously. This makes for a music that cannot be stylised as any one of those genres, so in a sense it defies categorisation.
The overall sound or ambience of the album is wide-ranging, full of formal or technical amalgamations, as well as the entirely spontaneous, and all together these combinations are the recording’s global sound. The overruling effect is a dizzying spell of frenetic performance which may leave you breathless.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
