Alan Shorter

On May 13, 2000 the Chicago Underground Quartet played one of the most searing and transcendent sets of music I’ve ever witnessed, as part of the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music. Cornetist Rob Mazurek, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Chad Taylor, and bassist Noel Kupersmith performed with a fiery singularity of purpose, ripping through its set like a bulldozer, albeit a machine marked by nuance and soulfulness. The following year the same line-up—which had previously made two albums for Delmark as the Chicago Underground Trio despite, with Parker nominally billed as a guest—dropped its eponymous debut on Thrill Jockey, serving up one of the strongest entries in the city’s modern history. Little did anyone know it would be nineteen years for the follow-up to surface.

The energy and reliability of these performances are exemplary. The F sharp Suite is beset with all sorts of problems but they are not revealed here. The F minor Suite has splendid fugue and, as I have said before, couldn't Handel write a good fugue untrammelled by academia which sometimes the fugues of the great J.S. Bach may be.

With his second album, Alan Sorrenti reached the most complex and brutal vocal experiment in all his career. The album's structure is similar to the previous Aria, a little bit extended being over 46 minutes of music and divided between the whole side's self titled epic (side two - 23 min.) and shorter and simpler songs.
For the recording sessions of the album he went to London and was helped by other famous guest musicians as Van der Graaf Generator sax hero David Jackson, who played flute and by Curved Air's member Francis Monkman on synthesizer, piano and electric guitar. Differently from Aria, his voice appears more nervous and complicated passing through stronger dissonances and unusual noises and strange sounds…

If ever there were a recording that should be played in small doses, it's this one! Alan Hovhaness' serene, metaphysical, meditative music can send you into a near trance-state or, depending on the work, into a rage. Working with the principles of oriental art and mysticism, Hovhaness creates musical cells of exquisite beauty and then, coming from that same paradigm, repeats them seemingly endlessly.

Mateen has always been a free jazz man in heart and soul, enjoying the rhythms, enjoying the freedom, enjoying the expressiveness, enjoying the interplay, and going at it to the full. Mateen is great on this album, and so is the band, and they are at their best in the high energy full steam moments, when the four musicians push each other forward relentlessly…