With a unique, two-handed approach that dispenses with the traditional notion of piano playing as competing or interlocking lines, Borah Bergman deals with sound as mass, great chilly bergs or hot flows of magma that change shape as different layers flow against one another, hardening and melting at different rates. By contrast, Lol Coxhill is a singer, a chanticleer on the dunghill of the city or on the rooftree of your house, a head full of old songs and the harmonic codes to transform them. The simplest difference may be that Coxhill comes from a jazz tradition, never more communicative than when playing changes and subverting a saccharine show-tune, while Bergman, for all his deep understanding of blues, boogie-woogie, swing, bebop, comes from somewhere else, classical, cantorial, exclamatory, De profundis clamavi . . . What unites them, though, even beyond the astonishing lingua franca of improvisation, is the idea of music as a kind of labour. Both seem to inhabit an old European ideal, anti-romantic and the toughest creative path there is, that subordinates the idea of works, perfect icons of expression ready for admiring consumption, to the idea of work, a physical, mental and moral effort that has ritual at one end of its spectrum and entertainment away at the other. These are hugely enjoyable pieces; they also have an element of ritual to them; but at their core is something much more profound and constantly evolving. The evolution of music of this kind depends on a very particular sense of time. Like some of the finest British "free" percussionists – Eddie Prevost, the late John Stevens, the younger Mark Sanders - Paul Hession has the ability to impart swing to apparently metreless playing. His virtues are easily overlooked because he seems to blend effortlessly into any background or environment - the classical evolutionary virtue - and one only becomes aware of his importance when he drops out for a measure or two. Such are the ironies of shedding a performing ego. Uniqueness is a much exaggerated quality. Every rock pulled from the ground is unique; the face and history of every passer-by different to the last; what's important, though, is what you make of them in the collective. Bergman and Coxhill are special and play special music, because they have committed themselves to something larger than individual expression.
